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CDEOUGHT DEPOSTE 



The New Earth 
And Other Sermons 



The New Earth 

And Other Sermons 



By 

HERBERT BOOTH SMITH, D. D. 

Pastor Immanuel Presbyterian Church 
Lcs Angeles, Cah 




New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1920, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 




Printed in the United State? of America 



® C1A570?16 



New York : 1 58 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago : 1 7 North Wabash Ave. 
London : 2 1 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 

JUL 1 b I • J c u 



To 



Jean and the boys 

who constitute 
the church that is in my house 
and to the 

three thousand members of Immanuel Church 
who constitute 
the church that is ever on my heart 



Foreword 



DURING the summer of the eventful year 
19 1 8, the National Service Commission of 
the Presbyterian Church planned a tour of 
the United States for some fifty of its ministers. 
These men were to go in companies of two each to 
assigned districts, and for six weeks or more carry 
the message of religious preparedness for the New 
Day that was to follow the war, to all whom they 
could reach. By way of preparation for this labour 
of love, a series of interviews was graciously ac- 
corded this group of ministers by the Department 
heads in Washington, including the President himself. 
Fresh from these conferences the men returned to 
prepare their messages of reconstruction and recon- 
secration. 

In the providence of God, however, the tour was 
never made. First: Because of the influenza epi- 
demic which closed all public meetings. Second : Be- 
cause of the unexpected signing of the armistice, al- 
most on the very day when the itinerant ambassadors 
of righteousness were to begin their work. The only 
recourse that was left to the men was to deliver their 
messages to their respective congregations. The 
writer, however, has dared to hope that some of these 
addresses might profitably reach a larger hearing, and 
hence this book. Read it if you will. Profit by it if 

7 



8 



FOEEWOED 



you can, and if you cannot, remember that the Scrip- 
ture says that " of making many books there is no 
end/' and give the author at least the credit of doing 
his part to help fulfill this prophecy. 

Herbert Booth Smith. 
Immanuel Church Study, Los Angeles, 



Contents 



I. 


The New Earth .... 


1 1 


II. 


The Breath of the New Day 


26 


III. 


The Stars Beyond the Smoke . 




IV. 


The Ministry For the Church of 
To-Day 


58 


V. 


A New Declaration of Interde- 
pendence 


76 


VI. 


Corn and the New Moon, or, Busi- 
ness and Religion 


94 


VII. 


The Twilight of the Kings 


107 


VIII. 


The Way of Cain .... 


125 


IX. 


Compulsory Atheism .... 


139 


X. 


Three Great Elements in Religion . 


1 54 


XL 


The Program of a Progressive Life 


168 


XII. 


God's Standard Man . 


186 


XIII. 


Near-Sighted Nazareth . 


205 



9 



I 



THE NEW EARTH 



* / saw a new earth." — Revelation 21 : 1. 
\HIS text sounds strange. We did not know 



it was in the Bible. Is it really there? 



JL Yes, there it is, in the place where it has 
always been, but the reason it sounds unfamiliar to 
you is that it has escaped emphasis because it stood in 
the background of another great statement which has 
hitherto been emphasized at the expense of its humble 
brother: "I saw a new heaven and a new earth." 
Oh yes, we place it now. That sounds familiar. 
But to tell the truth, every time we read that phrase 
we were so busy thinking about the new heaven and 
arguing where it was, that we did not have much 
interest left for the lower story of earth. Well now, 
I am going to pass by entirely the new heaven this 
morning without any apology, and tell you frankly 
that just at this juncture of events I am more inter- 
ested in the new earth than in the new heaven. 

Why ! What do we need a new earth for? We do 
not usually demand a new hat, or coat, or auto, or 
house, until the old ones have become worn out. Is 
that true of Earth? Is it worn out? Yes, I believe 
it is. The old regime, the old system, is worn out and 
run down at the heel, and instead of trying to patch 




11 



12 



THE NEW EAETH 



it up again, it is cheaper and simpler to build a new 
one. Nobody knows how old the earth is. One 
recent guess by the United States Geological Depart- 
ment is that the age of the earth is between 55,000,000 
and 75,000,000 years. Estimates differ widely, for 
Kelvin said 20,000,000, and Darwin 400,000,000 
years. Nobody knows. Theology has 132 different 
answers for the age of the earth at the birth of Christ. 
But while theologians differ in their estimates, scien- 
tists differ still more in theirs. The astronomer Hal- 
ley suggested a unique way of determining the age of 
the earth from the amount of salt contained in the 
ocean. The assumption is that once there was no 
salt water, and therefore all the salt in the ocean was 
once in the land, and has been washed into the water 
in the passage of time. Find out how much salt is 
now in the water, find out how much goes in in one 
year, then divide the former by the latter, and you 
get your answer. This is one method. The other 
basis of calculation is geological, and is a study of the 
various strata of rocks known to science. Darwin, 
Lyell, Reade and others have worked at the prob* 
lem from this point of view but there has been no 
agreement among authorities as yet. 

Here, then, comes the minister (who is neither a 
student of the sea nor of the rocks, but a watcher of 
the footprints of God in human history, and a reader 
of the signs of the times) and he makes this answer 
to the question, " How old is the earth to-day? 99 " It 
is old enough to demand a new kind of human life." 
So, then, his answer does not concern the physical 
age of the earth? Oh, not at all. It concerns the 



THE NEW EARTH 



13 



higher thing : the mental and moral and spiritual age 
of the earth. I say to Science : " You can figure on 
the age of the house humanity lives in; / am inter- 
ested in the age of the human race itself." " Well, 
then, you mean your sermon to-day is to discuss how 
long ago Adam lived? " " Oh, not at all. There are 
other ways of measuring time than the horizontal. I 
am talking about the vertical. Didn't the poet tell 
you long ago that we do not live in figures on a dial, 
but in heart-throbs of sympathy ? Paul does not say, 
' Grow in girth/ or ' Grow in gray-headedness/ but 
1 Grow in grace/ " That is my viewpoint. I believe 
the race has so grown in grace, and in the knowledge 
of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, that instead of 
believing we are ready for the pit, we may see so 
many signs of progress to-day that we may truthfully 
say, " I saw a new earth." Let me, then, call your 
attention to some of the things which catch our eye as 
we stand in the watch tower and survey the landscape 
o'er. 

/. There is a New Attitude Toward Class Dis- 
tinctions, or a New Appreciation of Humanity. 

Dr. Jowett once said that the difference between 
Jesus' attitude to people and the world's attitude to 
people might be expressed in this way: That the 
world divided people into three classes horizontally;; 
viz., the poor, the comfortable, and the rich. Jesus, 
on the other hand, divided people into two classes by 
a vertical line : the saved and the lost ; the sheep and 
the goats. Now, Jesus' line of division has been run- 
ning down through humanity ever since He pro- 



14 



THE NEW EAETH 



claimed it : " He that is not with me is against me." 
But His line has been obscured by those artificial lines 
which Society and Public Opinion have drawn, and, 
my friends, what we have got to do is to take the 
eraser of God's grace and rub out the world's line, 
and get back to the Jesus line. In other words, we 
must turn from the surface distinctions to the real 
distinctions ; from Dunn and Bradstreet to the Bible. 
For the word of God knows nothing of three stories 
of society, and woe be unto the Church if she pays 
any attention to them. I have no ambition to have it 
said of any church of mine that it is a church of mil- 
lionaires, where a Galilean Carpenter would not be 
welcome; but rather do I wish it written over my 
church : " The rich and the poor meet together. The 
Lord is the maker of them all." Dean Hodges of 
Cambridge tells of a Christian woman and a society 
leader who said to him she had had a remarkable ex- 
perience that day; she had met a carpenter on the 
street, and she forgot about his rough hands and 
soiled clothes in his interesting conversation. And 
Dean Hodges added, in his kindly but searching hu- 
mour : " What if it had been the Carpenter of Naza- 
reth?" 

Consider, then, how the war erased class distinc- 
tions. Why, the war gave the democracy of Jesus 
Christ a chance to break loose in the world. In 
England, for example, society ladies have done all 
sorts of dirty work in hospitals, and have found new 
meaning in life. People have carried parcels home 
from the stores who left it to delivery boys before. 
College professors and chauffeurs fought side by side, 



THE NEW EAETH 



15 



and each learned that the other was not half so bad 
as he thought he was. 

Lest some of you object that this thing of class dis- 
tinction has no bearing on religion, let me go back a 
ways. Do you know the Old Testament has a good 
deal to say on this question? The sixth chapter of 
Amos and the third chapter of Isaiah give an awful 
picture of the waste and extravagance of the rich 
people in their day. It has often been noted by his- 
torians and sociologists how similar conditions were 
in the eighth century b. c. (say in the time of Amos, 
Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah), to those which exist in 
our own day. Therefore, these old prophets have 
many messages for the twentieth century about this 
very matter of class distinctions. Away back in 
Deuteronomy you find legislation dealing with the 
problems of poverty, the land question, rates of in- 
terest, etc. The third chapter of Micah is a stern 
arraignment of the rich by this peasant-prophet, who 
himself had probably suffered under the lash of the 
oppressor. A minister who has since gone bodily 
over into Socialism told me once how his church 
officers objected when he read some of these stirring 
sermons of the eighth century prophets, and how an 
elder requested that he preach on a more peaceful and 
conventional line of thought. When you come on 
down to the time of Jesus, you find Him to be, as 
Lowell said, " the first true Democrat who ever 
breathed." He threw social distinctions to the winds, 
and horrified the prim and proper who always did the 
conventional thing. He loved to shock the stand- 
patter. He always voted with the minority. He was 



16 



THE NEW EAETH 



the first century Non-Conformist. He chose for His 
associates people like tax-gatherers and lepers and 
prostitutes. When He set up that revolutionary 
standard of His, the third-story people were awfully 
shocked, because that put them down on the street 
level, and they resented it. The Pharisees held an 
indignation meeting once, and came to His disciples 
and said : " Your Master is the limit. First,He talked 
with a man who is a sinner, and then He dined 
with a man who is a sinner, and last night He went 
in and lodged with a man who is a sinner." When 
you turn to the Book of James, you find that he hits 
class jealousy an awful blow. He says that those in 
charge of Christian worship, such as ushers and 
preachers, must not " take note of the face or per- 
son." What a realistic picture is that which he draws 
in his second chapter ! Here are two men who enter 
the synagogue at the same time. One wears a gold 
ring and gorgeous apparel. The other is a poor man 
in vile raiment. James tells you exactly what the 
average usher will do : " Ye have respect to him that 
weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him : ' Sit thou 
here in a good place ; ' and say to the poor : € Stand 
thou here, or sit here under the footstool/ Are ye not 
then .partial in yourselves ? " Probably James had 
seen this very thing happen in the Jerusalem syna- 
gogue. 

This brief survey of Scripture references will show 
that the abolition of caste is one element in the re- 
ligion of Jesus, and one essential to a holy earth. 
What we need is to see more through Christ's eyes 
and wherever the Gospel of the Carpenter has been 



THE NEW EARTH 



17 



fully preached it has leveled the classes and elevated 
the masses. A man went into the prayer meeting of 
a Christian Church in Seoul, Korea, where the floor 
was crowded with 1,200 recent converts. He saw the 
brother of the king sitting beside the humblest la- 
bourer. If you go to Constantinople you can see a 
building, which is called Robert College. The Russian 
Ambassador kept Dr. Hamlin for nine years from 
building that college, for he knew what it would do ; 
and one thing it has done is to make a free Bulgaria. 
If you go to China, you will see a Republic rising on 
the ruins of the Manchu Dynasty, and the only thing 
which explains the Chinese Revolution is the Gospel 
of the missionaries. As the Chicago Tribune said 
in the first week of the war: " This war is the twi- 
light of the kings. The Western democracy of the 
people marches Eastward." 

The business of Jesus, as I see it, has been to strip 
off surface distinctions. I can see the Master in fancy 
as He stands among a group of human beings, and He 
begins by stripping the colour off their skins ; He does 
not care whether they are red, yellow, black, or white. 
Then He strips the accent off their tongues ; He does 
not care whether they speak English, German, or 
French. Then He strips the check-book out of their 
pockets ; He does not care whether they are rich or 
poor. Then He strips the Past loose from the Pres- 
ent; He does not care whether they have a police 
record, or a family tree. After He gets all the trim- 
mings off He faces the crowd, all brother men, and 
says : " And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men 
unto me." I remember reading how, during the 



18 



THE NEW EAETH 



South African war, a Boer marksman shot a Con- 
naught ranger on the banks of the river Tugela. The 
Boer set about stripping the soldier of his clothes. 
He took off the great coat and loosened the tunic, and 
then saw lying on the breast of the dead soldier a 
crucifix. He stood still, looking down at it. There 
stretched a great gulf between the Puritan soldier 
and the Irish papist, but something bridged the gulf, 
and that something was the Cross of Christ. The 
Boer stood looking down at the crucifix for a while, 
and then took the coat and covered the poor body 
again, and walked away. He could do no indignity 
to the brother for whom Christ died. Even so shall 
the Gospel of the Cross be the bridge on which men 
shall tramp over to the promised land of Brotherhood 
into the New Day that is to be. 

//. A New Emphasis on Justice. 

All through the history of the world, Justice has 
been having a hard struggle for its life. Autocracy 
and Imperialism and Graft are not the inventions of 
the twentieth century. If you think so, open the 
pages of the Word of God and you will be disillu- 
sioned. The Pulpit has thundered against the Throne 
before now. Nathan denounced David for planning 
the temple, and for killing Uriah and marrying Bath- 
sheba. Gad reproved David for taking the census. 
Ahijah incited revolt against Solomon. A nameless 
prophet from Judah denounced Jeroboam for his 
false worship. Among other preachers who pro- 
tested against royal invasion of the people's rights 
were Shemaiah, Jehu, Elijah, and Elisha. 



THE NEW EARTH 



19 



The situation in Micah's day was very much like 
that of to-day. He saw that the weak and the poor 
could not obtain justice at the courts. The old tribal 
elders who sympathized with the peasants had dis- 
appeared, and in their place had come the princes 
appointed by the king, whose sole ambition was to get 
rich quickly. Class prejudice made them side with 
the rich and accept bribes. Then as now, the poor 
and oppressed, seeing they could not get their rights 
in a legal way, felt that they must take matters into 
their own hands and redress their wrongs by violence. 
The consequence was that repeated revolutions and a 
state of anarchy were the order of the day. The 
twentieth century after Christ was thus anticipated by 
the eighth century before Him. 

Isaiah, it seems to me, in his first chapter has a 
message for our time. He opposed the politicians. 
When they sought to insure the future of the nation 
by means of alliances with Assyria or Egypt, Isaiah 
advised trust in God as the only means of safety. 
He said that when the fiery trial is passed, a new 
order of just judges and counsellors will be estab- 
lished, and Zion shall be called the city of righteous- 
ness. So he referred the people to God as the ulti- 
mate Source of prosperity and justice. Emerson in 
his day did the same thing. Listen to these words in 
the light of the trenches : " Secret retributions are 
always restoring the level of the divine justice. It 
is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and 
proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set 
their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles evermore 
the ponderous equator to its line." Mr. Melville D. 



20 



THE NEW EAETH 



Post more recently in a current magazine has said 
the same thing. In a series of articles in the Satur- 
day Evening Post some time ago, he told of a num- 
ber of mysterious criminal cases that baffled the wits 
of even the shrewd officers. But in every instance, 
sooner or later the offender was detected, and after 
reviewing all the testimony Mr. Post closed his final 
article with the expression of the opinion that the un- 
guarded points which these criminals left might by 
some people be considered the vagaries of chance, but 
it looked as though they were the agencies of some 
overruling Authority set on ultimate justice. There 
is one brief utterance of the Psalms which I would 
commend to the attention of demagogues everywhere : 
" The faCe of the Lord is against them that do evil, 
to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth. ,, 

" By night and day, o'er land and sea, 
His silent couriers run; 
And soon or late, as sure as Fate, 
God's justice will be done. ,, 

77/. A New Theory of the State. 

Aristotle said there were three kinds of govern- 
ment : Monarchy, in which the rule was vested in one 
person; Aristocracy, where it was vested in a few; 
and Democracy, where it was vested in the whole 
people. Broadly speaking, we may say there are 
only two kinds of government and two theories of 
government in the world, Aristotle's three being re- 
ducible to two. The world war was waged to deter- 
mine which of these theories is correct. The one 
which we call Autocracy, or Monarchy, assumes that 



THE NEW EARTH 



21 



the Monarch is the State, ruling by divine command 
and saying with Louis XIV : " The State ? /am the 
State." No devil's lie in the history of the world 
has caused so much harm as this pagan view of the 
State. If we grant this premise, then the divine 
right of kings, and the legitimacy of war, and the 
supremacy of force, follow as naturally as day fol- 
lows night. If this idea is correct, then the State is 
an inhuman monstrosity, and I should join the I. W. 
W.'s in their demand that the State be overthrown, 
for government would be synonymous with tyranny. 

The other theory stands at the antipodes from this 
one: It says with Plato that the end for which a 
State exists is Justice. It says with Lincoln that no 
man, however good, is fit to govern another man 
without the latter' s consent. It says with Woodrow 
Wilson that the little powers of the world, the Czechs, 
the Slovaks, the Poles, and the Ruthenians, shall be 
allowed to choose under what form of government 
they shall live. It says that governments derive their 
just powers from the consent of the governed. It 
says, "I believe in His Majesty, the People, the 
Demos." It says that the State expresses the will 
and the preference of a free and sovereign people. 
It refers to the State not so much as a power, but 
rather as a brotherhood. 

The contrast between these two theories has been 
illustrated by Dr. Barton by two contrasted speeches : 
those of'the former Emperor of Germany, and of our 
great ex-President Lincoln, each man addressing the 
soldiers as their commander-in-chief. The German 
Emperor told his men they were to have no will of 



22 



THE NEW EAETH 



their own* They were all to have one will, and that 
was his. The President, speaking to a regiment 
on their way to the front in 1864, said: "I happen 
temporarily to occupy this White House. I am a 
living witness that any of your children may look to 
come here as my father's child has." When the 
Kaiser heard of a mother who had lost nine sons in 
the German army, he wrote her a grandiloquent letter 
of consolation and sent her his photograph. When 
Mr. Lincoln heard of a Mrs. Bixby who had lost five 
sons in the Civil War, he wrote that wonderful Bixby 
letter which is the finest example of English in so 
many words that I know. 

Now then, my brethren, there is only one question 
here for us this morning: not which is the nicer of 
these two theories, or the more efficient, but which is 
the more Christian ; which one would Christ approve ? 
No fair-minded thinker can hesitate long to answer 
that. Lord Acton has said that modern Democratic 
government came out of the Lutheran Reformation 
by way of the French Revolution, and the Reforma- 
tion came out of Luther, and Luther came out of 
Paul, and Paul came out of Jesus Christ. So you 
can trace modern political liberty directly back to 
Christ. As I see it, Jesus Christ is longing, my 
friends, to get His hand on the State, as well as on 
the individual. I believe if the Master could once 
show the world a great Christian State, He would see 
of the travail of His soul and be satisfied. Mr. 
Lecky has truly said that Christianity has been more 
successful in dealing with individuals than with com- 
munities. That is true. There has never been a real 



THE NEW EAETH 



23 



Christian commonwealth. There have been small 
Christian communities where the ideal has been aimed 
at, as in some of the Anabaptist settlements, especially 
in Monrovia after the Reformation; but for the most 
part, Christian States have been dominated by selfish 
worldly standards, as we know only too well. So 
that what we need in the twentieth century is a Chris- 
tianized Christendom ; and my pride is that America 
gave to the world the first illustration in history of a 
great world power asking itself, " What would Jesus 
do ? " God help us not to give up the fight until Jesus 
Christ shall be Lord not merely of our souls, but Lord 
of lords and King of kings. 

IV. A New Conception of Giving. 

Strange as it may seem, the very day I was writing 
this sermon there came to me through the mail the 
fifth number of Missionary Ammunition, and the 
title of this number was, " The Money Test." As I 
read its page after page of wonderful instances of 
sacrificial giving, I said, " Certainly I am in the right 
if I say that one of the characteristics of this new 
earth is to be a new conception of giving." On one 
page I read these words : " This war has been the 
greatest educator in beneficence which the world has 
ever seen. As a California man put it, 'This war 
has not only unlocked the money chests of rich men, 
but it has smashed the locks and the hinges/ " That 
is true. I recall that one May, while on a lecture trip 
out of the city, I met one of the travelling collectors 
of the Methodist Education Fund. To my surprise, 
I found that he had secured several thousand dollars 



24 



THE NEW EAETH 



in the little town where we had been. As we stood 
at a small out-of-the-way junction, he pointed to a 
frame grocery store at the cross-roads, and said, " I 
got a hundred dollars there." I would have thought 
he would have been lucky to get fifty cents. A cer- 
tain city pastor faced a missionary who wanted to 
make an appeal, with these words : " My people are 
being bled to death in these days." And yet, this 
man's church a few months later contributed more 
for Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., and Y. W. C. A. war 
work than this pastor ever dreamed possible, and did 
it with ease and joy. Something is happening, my 
friends, and that something is this: We are getting 
new standards of giving; and one almost begins to 
believe that maybe Jesus was half-way right when 
He said, " It is more blessed to give than to receive." 

Some ten years ago the pastor of a very wealthy 
church placed over his pulpit the motto of the Lay- 
men's Missionary Movement : " Not how much of 
my money I will give to God, but how much of God's 
money will I keep for myself." The striking state- 
ment began to do its work. A rich woman, not in 
sympathy with missions, came to the pastor and said : 
" I wish you would put that sign away. It offends 
my aesthetic taste, and is not in keeping with the beau- 
tiful surroundings." Technically she was correct; 
but something else was hurt beside her taste, and that 
was her conscience. She was beginning to get a new 
vision of giving. Finally she said: " I will give you 
five hundred dollars if you will remove it." * That 
is not enough," said the pastor. " That is worth a 
missionary a year." On asking how much a mission- 



THE NEW EAETH 



25 



ary would cost, and on being told that twelve hundred 
dollars a year was necessary, she agreed to give it. 
The motto was then removed to the Sunday-school 
room, where it began to do its quiet work again. But 
the woman had learned the lesson of stewardship, and 
since that time has given $50,000 for local charity, 
and still supports her missionary beside. 

Now, what do you think of this new earth which I 
have briefly sketched? Do you want to live there? 
If so, take a hand and help to bring it about. This 
new Utopia will not drop down from the skies like a 
ready-made paradise. It will be manufactured out 
of the toil of human hands, and the sacrifice and 
sympathy of human hearts. Let us, then, see if we 
can persuade heaven to get a little nearer to earth 
than it has been heretofore. Some of the old Jewish 
fathers in the first century drew a picture of the new 
earth in which the trees would be so fruitful that 
they would bear ripe fruit every day. The righteous 
were to feast upon cake, and clothe themselves in silk. 
God would serve a banquet of sea-monsters and oxen 
from paradise, and mammoth birds, and a glorious 
wine which had been stored up from the beginning of 
the world. Those were some of the delights held out 
to the faithful. I offer you no such attractive menu 
or program, but simply the chance of rebuilding civi- 
lization up into a better world than the one we had 
before the war. 

" To the work, to the work, then, ye servants of God, 
Let us follow the path that our Master has trod ; 
With the balm of His counsel our strength to renew 
Let us do with our might what our hands find to do ! " 



n 



THE BREATH OF THE NEW DAY 

" Till the day break (breathe), and the shadows flee away." 
— Song o# Solomon 2 : 17. 

I SHALL not occupy your time this morning with 
a laboured exegesis of the setting of the text. 
There are so many interpretations of the Song 
of Solomon that we should have to spend too much 
time in the vestibule. Let me invite you right into 
the drawing-room of this beautiful sentence. Some- 
thing is going to last, we are told, until the day break 
(or breathe, as the Hebrew has it), and the shadows 
flee away. 

Daybreak is a wonderful time. It is the victory of 
light over the retiring forces of darkness. The 
shadows of night have held the field for several hours, 
and have come to regard it as their own. But when 
the shining battalions of day march on the field, the 
serried ranks of murky warriors break and flee. If 
you have ever watched the battle, you know that your 
sympathies are always with the invaders rather than 
with the pursued. Well, now I believe, my brothers 
and sisters, that the world to-day in the year of God's 
grace 1920 is moving out of shadow into morn. The 
glorious kiss of dawn is on the eastern sky. Even as 
I have stood on the Jericho road and watched God 
painting red on the Syrian sky over the hills of Moab, 
30 I think I can stand on the Avenue of Re-creation 

26 



THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAY 27 



and Renovation, and see God, like a divine flagman or 
heavenly traffic officer, waving away the dark and 
waving in the day. 

I think I can describe the night by one word, Self- 
ishness; and the dawn by one word, Altruism. If I 
am not mistaken, the funeral we are witnessing is the 
burial of Egoism, and the birth is the birth of Other- 
ism. In other words, you have the suicide of Self- 
ishness, and the incarnation of Love. Now, if the 
race is to endure, this is a biological as well as a 
moral necessity. One of the oldest truths in exist- 
ence, older than Christianity, older than the Bible, 
older than humanity, is that Love is Life. Take the 
microscope, and peer down into the smallest level of 
life observable, and there you will see in the act of cell 
division that the welfare of the species depends on the 
sacrifice of the individual. In every normal organism 
the living cells are every hour performing the act of 
self-sacrifice for the good of the whole organism. 
When you come up as high as the human body, you 
find 26,000,000,000,000 cells, all in a great corpora- 
tion, not one of which is living for itself alone. Now, 
if Love and Service and Sacrifice are the laws of life 
down on the biological scale, they are equally the con- 
ditions of life up on the human and spiritual plane. 
So that Jesus Christ was biologically accurate, as well 
as theologically correct when He said : " He that 
keepeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life 
for my sake shall find it." 

Philosophy adds its word to that of Science. Some 
of the English moralists of the eighteenth century de- 
bated this question, and the two conflicting views held 



28 THE BEEATH OP THE NEW DAT 



were these; Mandeville wrote "The Fable of the 
Bees/' in which he tried to show that the well-being 
of Society rests on the selfish instincts of the indi- 
vidual. He held that greed, and jealousy, and envy, 
and ambition, are the real roots of all achievements; 
and that virtue, on the other hand, is merely artificial, 
or else it is pretense. Shaftesbury took the other 
viewpoint, that man is really a social being, and no 
individual is, as Lowell said, whole in himself. Man 
is so constituted that he cannot seek his own good 
without seeking the good of the whole system to 
which he belongs. Shaftesbury was the first writer 
to suggest this idea of a moral sense, a doctrine which 
is such an important element of our thinking to-day. 

The same difference of viewpoint is seen between 
Aristotle and Jesus of Nazareth. Aristotle held that 
man happy who receives emoluments and honours, 
and that man unhappy who is compelled to give in- 
stead of receive. Jesus, strange to say, reverses the 
currents of procedure, and said, " It is more blessed 
to give than to receive." Civilization is now testing 
whether Mandeville or Shaftesbury, Aristotle or 
Jesus Christ, is right. On the one side of the ques- 
tion are such witnesses as Caesar, Charlemagne, 
Napoleon, and William II; on the other, such wit- 
nesses as Stephen, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Paul, and 
Jesus of Nazareth. The world must act as judge, 
and impanel a jury and pronounce the verdict. You 
are out in the court-room looking on. In order to 
help you come to a conclusion, let me give you four 
different pictures of this conflict. I am called in to 
testify, and I shall undertake to show that in four 



THE BEEATH OP THE NEW DAY 29 



different spheres Selfishness has been put to flight, 
and the New Day has won. 

/. There is the Shadow of Personal Selfishness, or 
Individualism. 

Observers from the battle-fields of Europe have 
brought back word that when men's thoughts are 
dominated by a sense of responsibility for others, fear 
always vanishes. Now, this is a fact which Science 
easily explains. Fear is one of the selfish emotions ; 
that is to say, it is one of the principal impulses to 
self-protection. As long as you can keep an animal 
or a man thinking about self-protection and self- 
interest, fear and hate will be present. But just as 
soon as consciousness becomes dominated by interest 
in the welfare of others, courage supplants fear. We 
know how a dog fights for his master, and a mother 
for her child. Now then, following this clue a little 
further, we discover that fear depresses and weakens 
human life — is a negative emotion, while altruism 
strengthens and elevates — is a positive emotion. Ah, 
now we understand why Paul told those Corinthians 
to seek one another's good. This is why Jonathan 
gave David his sword, and Abraham gave Lot his 
choice, and Christ gave the world His life. 

The shadow is lifting from the broader battle-fields 
of life, as well as from the fields of Flanders and 
France. Men are living out the parable of the grain. 
They find that the living grain is very lonely, but the 
dying grain brings forth much fruit. So Marshall 
Wilder believed. He went up to George Wharton 
James as they stood together behind the scenes just 



30 THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAT 



before he went out on the stage to do his turn. He 
was suffering excruciating agony, as he often did, 
from his frail and deformed body, and the sweat was 
pouring down his cheek. " Put your arms around 
me and love me tight, George," he gasped, and Mr. 
James did so. He gripped his friend with fierce in- 
tensity, and then, wiping his brow and face with a 
brave but ghastly smile, rushed upon the stage, and 
in a moment had his audience laughing at his quips 
and jokes. By making some one else happy, he for- 
got himself. So Wilberforce also did. He was so 
busy helping the downtrodden slaves that an inquisi- 
tive lady one day said to him : " Mr. Wilberforce, 
aren't you afraid you will neglect your own soul in 
the midst of your work for others ? " To which he 
replied : " You are quite right, Madam. I had for- 
gotten that I had a soul." Brave old Bishop! He 
was willing to risk God's mercy on his own soul, while 
he spent himself for others. 

Nobody crowns with a halo the selfish life. Jesus 
never said, " Blessed are they that spare themselves, 
for they shall be safe and sweet and have a manicured 
soul." No, but He did say many a time, " Blessed 
are they that fling themselves away for a noble cause, 
for they shall be immortal." The rosebud that shuts 
in on itself is soon black at the heart ; but the flower 
that gives its beauty to the passer-by, and its fra- 
grance to the breeze, is red with the glow of life. 
Mr. Bryan has compared the two types of life to the 
buzzard and the bee. The buzzard soars high, but it 
never soars so high but that it is thinking of itself and 
looking for something to eat, and when it dies it 



THE BEEATH OP THE NEW DAY 31 



leaves nothing but its own body; while the bee pro- 
duces more than it consumes, and leaves a legacy of 
honey when it dies. Who wants to be a buzzard? 
Nobody loves a buzzard. It is too lonely a life. 
The Central Powers of Europe have adopted the 
philosophy of the buzzard for themselves, and where 
are they to-day ? Echo answers, " Where ? " They 
are somewhat like the lady in " Stamboul Nights " 
who lived alone, but in order to have company she 
had her house filled with mirrors, and whichever way 
she turned she saw herself. Rowland Sill sat down 
and wrote to a friend something like this : " For my 
part, I long to fall in with somebody. This picket 
duty is monotonous. I hanker after a shoulder on 
this side and on the other." Well, we all do. I don't 
know about abnormal people, but normal human folks 
have what Henry James called a " contributing and 
participating view of lif e." Thomas a Kempis wrote 
the doom of the black selfish life in this way: " He 
who seeks his own loses the things in common." 

Do you know, I was surprised at the Bible's mod- 
ern viewpoint on this matter of selfishness when I 
turned to the topic the other day. The first illustra- 
tion that met my eye was this: Hoarding Foodstuff. 
Proverbs 11:26. " He that withholdeth corn the 
people shall curse him, but blessing shall be upon the 
head of him that selleth it." There you have the 
condemnation of the food profiteer away back in 
Solomon's time. What think you was the second? 
Greed for Real Estate. Isaiah 5:8. "Woe unto 
them that join house to house, that lay field to field, 
till there be no place, that they may be placed alone 



32 THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAY 



in the midst of the earth ! " You see, land magnates, 
a perfect description of the baronial and junker class 
of Germany. Here was the third: Total disregard 
of the rights of others. Ezekiel 34 : 18. " Seemeth 
it a small thing unto you to have eaten up the good 
pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the 
residue of the pastures? and to have drunk of the 
deep waters, but ye must foul the residue with your 
feet ? " How about Germany's poisoning the water 
supply of the French and Flemish cities ? Here was 
the last : Neglect of the needy and suffering. Matthew 
25 : 43. " I was a stranger, and ye took me not in ; 
naked, and ye clothed me not : sick and in prison, and 
ye visited me not." This for the people who sink 
hospital ships, and dynamite sick and dying men, and 
crucify babies, and defile the earth with their pres- 
ence. Have I not cited enough to show you that the 
sins of the black night of European diplomacy are 
sins of Selfishness ? But the day is breaking. Watch- 
man, what of the night ? Cheer up, the morning com- 
eth, and in its winged chariot comes peace to men of 
good will. 

//. There is the Shadow of Civic Selfishness: 

Nationalism. 

I believe that the Nation or State is one of the 
mile-stones on the avenue of human progress, but not 
the end of the journey. We so often make the mis- 
take of imagining that because a caravan halts a long 
time at a certain tavern, that is as far as it is going. 
As you look back along the roadway of Evolution, 
first there is the mile-stone of the Individual, then 



THE BEEATH OP THE NEW DAY 33 



the mile-stone of the Family, then that of the Tribe, 
and finally that of the Nation. Well, is the journey 
done? There is where we have been standing for 
many years, but the great war is going to push the 
caravan ahead. The next mile-stone is the mile-stone 
of the World; or in other words, Internationalism. 
To show you what I mean, look at the ancient Jews. 
They stopped at the mile-stone of the Nation, and 
refused to march on. God wanted them to wait there 
for a while. He elected them as His chosen people. 
But mark this : it was an election not to privilege, but 
to service. So when the day came for them to march 
beyond their boundary, God sent Jonah to Nineveh, 
and Philip to Samaria and Gaza, and Paul to Asia 
Minor and Rome, and Jesus to Galilee and Samaria 
and Calvary, and through the cross to the whole 
world. So you see that God regards the Nation as a 
good enough stopping place, but not the goal. Just 
as the chambered nautilus continually outgrew its old 
quarters and built itself a larger home, leaving its 
outgrown shell by Time's unresting sea, so must 
humanity do ; and the State is one of these outgrown 
shells, and we must leave it by the wayside and 
" carry on." 

Professor Dewey has shown in a recent book that 
while national considerations are important, moral 
considerations are more important. We have got to 
change the old slogan, " My Country, right or wrong," 
and now phrase it, " My Country must be right, and 
not wrong." If the world war was caused by the 
protective tariff, as some tell us, then let us have 
free trade. Prof. Franklin H. Giddings has said: 



34 THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAY 



" Until the nations are ready for world-wide free 
trade, they will waste their breath in praying for 
world peace." The author of " The Audacious War 99 
writes : " The sentiment under a protective tariff is 
national selfishness. ,, Well, brethren, if this be true, 
we must revise our schedules, for no nation liveth 
unto itself any more, and none dieth unto itself. 
Hear an Indian gentleman's explanation of " The 
Root Cause of the Great War," as he calls his book. 
He finds the cause of the war is the Darwinian theory 
of the survival of the fittest, and claims that the new 
light which can dissipate the old darkness must come 
from the East, as light usually does; from the East 
with its ideals of altruism and mysticism. I would 
agree with him that it must come from the East, but 
if you ask me where in the East, I would say not 
from India, but from Calvary. 

As I look into the New Day ahead, I see the Chris- 
tianizing of the State. Why should not the Nation 
be converted? It is only an enlarged individual. 
Jesus Christ is big enough to dominate 100,000,000 
people as well as one person. I think Jesus has often 
lived over again the fourteenth chapter of Luke, as 
He has seen the nations elbowing one another out of 
one sphere of influence into another. You remember 
how Jesus poked some quiet humour at His fellow 
guests at one dinner to which He was invited. The 
Greek says : " He began to tell the guests a story 
with a meaning, for He noticed how they were pick- 
ing out the chief seats." Jesus said to them: "If 
you really want a good seat, go and sit at the bottom 
place, for as the last man keeps on moving up, he 



THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAT 35 



will finally reach the top place." There are three 
stages, you see, in the evolution of good manners, 
both for the individual and the nation. The first 
stage is push and thrust, like the beasts. The second 
stage is concealed selfishness, or so-called good man- 
ners. The third stage is self-forgetfulness, or altru- 
ism. The nations have stopped in the first and second 
stages, and Jesus is begging them to go on to the third. 
God grant that they may ! 

Any one could fill a volume with stories of the 
night, the night of national selfishness. Think of 
America's treatment of the Red man, the Black man, 
or the Yellow man, and ask if America has acted like 
a White man. England forced opium on China, and 
Russia persecuted the Jews. Belgium committed 
atrocities in the rubber regions of the Congo, and 
Germany stole Alsace Lorraine. Great Britain went 
down into Africa with the cry "Avenge Majuba " on 
her lips, and Italy swooped down on Tripoli more in 
the fashion of an eagle or a buzzard than a peace 
dove. The "balance of power" has kept Christian 
nations with their hands tied, while Turkey has gone 
on massacring the Armenians and the Syrians. So 
that one of the first things necessary is a Christianized 
Christendom, and it begins to look as though that 
were being done when you see the Sermon on the 
Mount finding place in diplomatic notes. It is said 
that when Blucher came to London after the battle 
of Waterloo, to see what the world's metropolis was 
like, among other sights they showed him was the 
view from the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. The 
narrator tells us that when the distinguished warrior 



36 THE BEBATH OP THE NEW DAT 



looked forth upon the expanse of throbbing life the 
blood came into his face, and forgetting himself he 
cried out, " Oh, what a place for plunder ! " That 
is the old regime for you. That is last night, the 
night of the old world. But that is not to-morrow. 
No ! A new day is about to be born. One of our 
great Presidents said in an anniversary address: 
" Selfishness never keeps a centennial ; it is too soon 
extinct." So let us have no centennial of the war, 
for that would be a centennial of selfishness and 
plunder; but let us have many happy returns of the 
New Day. — 

" The day of rest and gladness, The day of joy and light, 
The balm of care and sadness, Most beautiful, most 
bright!" 

III. The Shadow of Ecclesiastical Selfishness, or 
Denominationalism. 

I don't know just when Denominationalism arose, 
but I do know that we find a surprisingly early ex- 
ample of it in the Church at Corinth. You find this 
referred to in the first chapter of First Corinthians. 
Paul states that certain informants have told him that 
there were as many as four parties in the Corinthian 
Church. There was the Paul party, and the Apollos 
party, and the Peter party, and the Christ party. I 
can imagine how these divisions might have arisen. 
I can fancy one brother would say : " Well, I am for 
Paul. He is the missionary who started this work 
going, and I think we ought to be called the Pauline 
Memorial Church." Here would be another brother 
who would say: "Well, I am for Apollos. I was 
carried away with his eloquent preaching, and I, for 



THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAY 37 



one, am an Apollinarian." Here would be a third 
who might say : " Well, I am for calling the Church 
after Peter, for he defended the faith in those won- 
derful sermons of his before Paul was ever heard of 
in the Church, and I think it is a shame to pass by 
Peter and honour Paul. ,, Then here would be the 
fourth brother, corresponding to some folks to-day, 
who would say : " Let us forget all our divisive names, 
and call ourselves the Christian Church. I am for 
Christ. Let all human leaders go." So the divisions 
rose, and this fourth party was just as much denomi- 
national as the rest, only it wanted a more inclusive 
name. 

Denominationalism, then, is no new thing, and has 
not been an unmitigated evil — not at all. The de- 
nominations represent differences of temperament as 
well as interpretation. You take an average Chris- 
tian — let us suppose you find him a Presbyterian. 
Add a little more starch, and he will become an Epis- 
copalian. Add still more, and he will become a 
Romanist. On the other hand, if instead of starch 
you add water, he will become a Baptist ; and if you 
add still more water, a Campbellite. Broaden him 
out by flattening him so thin that there will not be 
much thickness left to his theology, and he becomes a 
Unitarian or a Universalist. Expose him to all 
changes of temperature — heat and cold and double 
positions, as the watchmakers do with their watch 
tests, and if he comes through them all alive he is a 
Christian Scientist. And so we might go on. If 
this is true, then, as long as people are human there 
will be varieties of temperament and ecclesiastical 



38 THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAY 



preference. Surely it is better that those who prefer 
the liturgical service should be by themselves, and 
those who prefer the simple service by themselves, 
rather than that they should be all altogether and con- 
tinually get on one another's nerves. So I can easily 
see, as you can, that Denominationalism has its ad- 
vantages. People have different tastes in politics, in 
food, and in amusements, and it is not strange that 
they should have different tastes in theology. 

The trouble comes when we take the foot-note, the 
parenthesis, and make it the main thing. Denomina- 
tionalism is secondary to the Kingdom of Christ, and 
when we reverse the order we get into trouble. Sid- 
ney Lanier describes this condition of things in his 
" Remonstrance." In it he demands that Opinion let 
him alone, and cease to feature his Lord by rule and 
line. He attempts to join one group of worshippers, 
but they reject his presence: 

" Save to our rubric thou subscribe, and swear 
Religion hath blue eyes and yellow hair, 
She's Saxon all." 

Then, still hungry for fellowship, he turns to a second 
group, who thus reply : 

" Nay, not with me, save thou subscribe, and swear 
Religion hath black eyes and raven hair, 
Naught else is true." 

And then the poet turns indignant upon Opinion, 
which would usurp the place of Faith, and calls him 
an assassin and a thief : 

" Thou savest Barabbas in that hideous hour, 
And stabbest the good Deliverer Christ" 



THE BEEATH OP THE NEW DAT 39 



Glance at the facts of Denominationalism for a 
moment. There are 201 denominations in this coun- 
try of ours. There are six different kinds of Ad- 
ventists, fifteen kinds of Baptists, ten varieties of 
Catholics, twenty-one types of Lutherans, sixteen 
brands of Methodists, twelve sorts of Presbyterians, 
twelve kind of Mennonites, etc. It seems to me that 
by close economy we could get along without quite 
so many. The differences between some of these 
branches remind one of Lloyd George's famous bon 
mot. He was driving through northern Wales with a 
famous Free Churchman, and the conversation 
turned on denominational differences. " The Church 
to which I belong," said the famous statesman, " is 
torn with a fierce dispute. One part says that Bap- 
tism is in the name of the Father, and the other that 
it is into the name of the Father, etc. I belong to one 
of these parties. I feel most strongly about it. I 
would die for it. But I forget which it is." This 
speech illustrates the fact that many of the differences 
which divide us are unworthy of the great day of 
federation and cooperation and alliance in which we 
live. I firmly believe that one result of the great war 
is going to be a closer approximation to the great 
brigading together of the Christian forces than we 
have ever had before. If Marshal Foch could unite 
our soldiers, why can't Jesus Christ unite our Chris- 
tians? He is leading in a far greater warfare, 
against an enemy a thousand times as fierce as Berlin. 
The poison gas is on us, and we would fain turn 
from it. But cheer up, discouraged Christian work- 
ers! The day is breaking and the night is gone. 



40 THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAY 



Say to the forces of Evil in the name of a united 
Church, " You shall not pass." And when the Devil 
and his cohorts find that the Christians are getting 
together, they will sign an armistice of unconditional 
surrender. For Jesus Christ has promised not to 
any one denomination, but to His Church, that the 
gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 

IV. There is the Shadow of Religious Selfishness 
or Atheism. 

Here is the last step in the process. Just as the 
world has gone beyond personal selfishness into 
brotherhood, beyond State selfishness into Interna- 
tionalism, beyond Church selfishness into the King- 
dom of God, so may we not hope that humanity will 
go beyond soul selfishness into harmony with the God 
and Father of our spirits, and His Son Jesus Christ? 
We cannot live unto ourselves, and if we cannot live 
without one another, we certainly cannot live without 
God. This is the tragic Atheism. I am not talking 
about the Atheism which is a theological fact, but a 
moral fact. I am talking about banishing God from 
our horizon, and setting up in business for ourselves 
in an orphaned world. 

What I mean is put into beautiful form by the 
Persian legend which tells of a lover who knocked 
at the door of his beloved and craved admission. 
" Who is there ? " asked a voice from within. " It 
is I," said the lover. But the voice gave answer, 
" There is no room in the house for thee and me." 
So the lover went away, and wandered for a year in 
the wilderness, and came once again to the door. 



THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAY 41 



" Who is there ? " said the voice. And this time he 
answered, " It is thyself " ; and the door was opened. 
He had so identified his will and personality with 
that of his beloved that he could say, " I am thyself/' 
and she let him in. So ought humanity to march out 
of its little things into the tremendous domains of the 
love of God. 

I believe that many men have rediscovered God in 
these stern days of flood and fire, Professor Leuba to 
the contrary notwithstanding. He thought he dis- 
covered a few years ago that American men of 
science, real cultured men, did not believe in a per- 
sonal God, and he said the more eminent the men 
were, the less they believed in God. Well, if Atheism 
was ever at a premium, it is not now. The old 
Sophist who was expelled from Athens for heresy, 
and whose book began with the words, " Of the gods, 
I know not whether they are or are not," and was 
burned in the market-place, — has not found any great 
following. Epicureanism, with its jaunty way of 
looking at life through rose-coloured glasses, may do 
well enough for times of piping peace, especially when 
it tells us that the gods do not concern themselves at 
all with the present world, and therefore we must not 
fear the gods or dread death. But beyond all your 
science and philosophy, when men find themselves up 
against the circumstances of a world like this, they 
are mighty prone to ask : " Is there a God ? Does He 
care? And if so, is He able to do as He wills?" 
Hence, I believe that God is going to have His right- 
ful place in the New Days that are to be; that He 
will be not merely a theological postulate, a convenient 



42 THE BEEATH OF THE NEW DAY 

axiom, or a national party cry, but a Real Discovery 
to a world which has been through the conflict, and 
has been purified as by fire. 

I wonder if I have said anything to send you away 
to-day with a morning heart. We ought to have 
springtime souls, for the old order is dead, and be- 
yond Death always comes Resurrection. Have you 
an April heart to-day? Oh, get out into the op- 
timism of faith, and believe in the breaking day. 
Can't you see the old shadows packing up their tents 
and making off into the night, leaving the field to us 
children of the sunshine? Oh, my brothers and sis- 
ters, I believe in the God of the dawn. Slowly the 
Father lifts the curtain on the sunlit surprises of the 
world's great Christmas Day, and among the Christ- 
mas gifts I think I see the things I have mentioned 
to-day. During the influenza epidemic a certain 
service was allowed in the open air, provided the 
worshippers would sit two feet apart. Men have 
been doing that thing long enough. Individuals have 
sat two feet apart, nations two feet apart, churches 
two feet apart, men and God two feet apart. But no 
such orders are to be issued in the New Day. Rather, 
the ordinance must read that men will be permitted 
to do so and so provided they will be sweethearts, 
provided they will fall in love with each other, and 
fall in love with God, Such is the vision which 
I would leave with you. And once again I turn 
to the dear old words with which I began : " My 
beloved is mine, and I am his. He feedeth among the 
lilies, until the day break, and the shadows flee away." 



nr 



THE STARS BEYOND THE SMOKE 

" Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord" — Isaiah 43 : 10. 
* Ye shall be witnesses unto me." — Acts 1 : 8. 

I WANT to bring together two texts this morn- 
ing, one from the Old Testament and the other 
from the New, and set them down side by side 
for purposes of comparison. One interesting thing 
about the Bible is that you can take texts from the 
most distant books and set them down side by side, 
and they do not conflict. The first of my two texts 
is from the Book of Isaiah, and I read these words : 
" Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord." The second 
of the two is from the Book of Acts, and I read, " Ye 
shall be witnesses unto me." Now here they are, one 
from the eighth century b. c, and the other from the 
first century a. d. One is spoken by the great prophet 
of the Old Testament, the other by the great Prophet 
of the New Testament. One is to Jews and the other 
to Christians. And yet, the same word is used to 
describe God's Church in both cases, the only differ- 
ence in the two statements being in the tense. God 
says, " Ye are my witnesses ; " and Christ says, " Ye 
shall be mine." Now, this change in tense is signifi- 
cant. Bring the application down to the modern 
Church in the twentieth century. The Church to- 
day is a witness unto God. Yes, that is true. But 
the Christ of these great days of Reconstruction 

43 



44 THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 



throws it into the future tense and says : " I am not 
satisfied with the present-day witnessing. You have 
got to be bigger and better witnesses in the future 
than you have ever been in the past." And so as the 
Master faces these new days, I seem to hear Him say- 
ing to the Church of America : " Ye shall be witnesses 
unto me in the United States, and in Canada, and in 
Mexico, and in devastated France, and in Armenia 
and Syria, and all foreign lands, and unto the utter- 
most parts of the earth." 

Now, let us look into this word " witness." My 
count shows that the word is used 179 times in the 
Word of God Let me take it up and look at it to 
see if I can discover more fully what my two texts 
mean. The fact is that very few documents were 
used in ancient times, but business contracts were 
made in public at the gates of cities, and some formal 
ceremony had to be gone through which witnesses 
might observe and recall in after years. The pro- 
cedure was very simple. The courts were held in 
the open. Each side, accused and accuser, stated its 
case. The accuser stood at the right hand of the 
accused, who frequently wore a mourning garb. 
Two or three witnesses were summoned, who testi- 
fied on oath, and the very heaviest penalties were in- 
flicted for false witnessing or bribing of judges. 
Loyalty to truth was never a prominent virtue among 
Asiatic peoples, and hence one of our Ten Com- 
mandments forbids the practice of false witnessing. 
Now the witnesses, in case of the death penalty, were 
the first to lay their hands on the condemned man 
and to execute the sentence. Josephus says that 



THE STABS BEYOND THE SMOKE 45 



women and children were excluded from giving testi- 
mony by the Mosaic Law, and this may have been 
partly on account of the above custom. This brief 
survey of ancient customs will prepare us for a word 
about modern times. In our modern law courts at- 
tendance as a witness is a compulsory duty, and the 
presence of any person for the purpose of acting as 
a witness can be compelled by law. If a witness does 
not attend at the time and place mentioned, he is liable 
to be punished either by imprisonment or fine. "Any 
person is compelled to become a witness who has suf- 
ficient mental capacity to understand the nature of 
an oath and the nature of the matters about which he 
is to testify." 

Now, let us go back to our texts. It must be evi- 
dent that, in the light of the Bible and the law books, 
witness bearing, or the giving of testimony, is a 
supremely important duty. Very well, then, the 
Church must not neglect its performance. And yet, 
the history of the Church shows that this privilege 
has often been sadly forgotten. Take as just one 
proof of this statement the rise of Mohammedanism. 
Bishop Nicholson says that the origin of Islam can 
be traced to Christian slackers. Once all North 
Africa was Christian. There were five hundred 
bishops and countless scholars. But what happened ? 
The Church became self-satisfied and exclusive. 
" We live in a different world/' said Cyprian ; " we 
draw to ourselves, and feast our souls on the vision 
of God." That was their mistake. While they were 
eaten up with egotism, there were hungry souls out 
in the desert. While the Church was quibbling over 



46 THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 



theological puzzles, a crafty fellow took the Old 
Testament out in the desert and brought forth the 
Koran. Mohammedanism need not have cursed the 
world had the Church been faithful to its testimony. 

Let me use this as a parable. Again the Church 
has its scholars and dignitaries. Once again the 
world is a desert full of hungry souls waiting to be 
fed with the Bread of Life. What shall we do? 
Well, there are just two roads we may take, and you 
find them both in the story of the loaves and fishes. 
One is the road of selfishness ; the other, the road o£ 
service. The first says : " Send the people away that 
they may buy bread; it is not our business to feed 
them. The Church did not start the war. The world 
did. Let the world finish it. We will go on with our 
meditations." But the other answer is the way of 
the great Master : " They need not depart. Give ye 
them to eat." Oh, Church ! The world of war-sick 
people need not go elsewhere for guidance. Give ye 
them to eat. You have not only five loaves and two 
fishes. You have the Book of Life. Answer their 
pleading call. Swing your doors outward instead of 
inward. Don't build a sound-proof wall between 
yourselves and the desert. Sing out your anthems of 
Renewal and Reconstruction. Find a path through 
the maze. Give them a few great standards by 
which to measure Truth. Exhibit a few familiar 
landmarks in the landscape which has been upset by 
the cyclone. Hang out a few stars beyond the 
smoke. " Be my witnesses," saith the Lord. Let 
me suggest three or four elements of the Church's 
testimony. 



THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 47 



/. One Great Word the Church Should Empha- 
size is Righteousness. 

You know how repeatedly during the early stages 
of the war the question was asked : " What are we 
fighting for? Somebody please tell us what all this 
is about. Are we like boys at play who tussle just 
for the fun of it, just to show our new uniforms or 
try our new guns? Or are we really trying to get 
somewhere ? If so, somebody please tell us where we 
are trying to go. We don't mind fighting down in the 
mud if we are on our way to the stars, but we insist 
on seeing the stars through the mist. Beyond the 
real must be the ideal. This business of killing we 
are engaged in is not the ultimate. This is just the 
wilderness leading to the promised land. But tell 
us more about this promised land." You remember 
how often this was heard in the early days of con- 
flict, and how in response to this universal call the 
leading spokesmen of the world on both sides of the 
conflict set down on paper some of the things they 
were fighting for. It may not be generally known 
that eighteen months after the war began the British 
Government appointed a committee to study the prob- 
lems of Reconstruction. This was not due to any 
illusions that the war was nearly over, but simply a 
wise desire to prepare beforehand for ultimate days 
of peace. So in the same way, the Church lifted its 
hand above the smoke and said to the warring 
peoples : " Listen to my voice. Stop the machine 
guns one moment. Don't lose your soul down there 
in the battle. Remember you are fighting for right- 
eousness, for the rule of Right rather than Might." 



48 THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 



Let us consider this a moment. Righteousness is 
one of the great notes of the Scripture piano which 
is struck time and again. The Hebrew words for 
righteousness in the Old Testament signified Tight- 
ness; that is the righteous man is a man who is 
right with God. Now, the eighth century prophets 
said the same thing in different words. They taught 
ethical monotheism for the first time in history. God 
is one, and God is holy. Hence, since God is right- 
eous, He demands righteousness in men. That was 
their argument "What doth the Lord require of 
thee, O man, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to 
walk humbly with thy God ? " Notice this, my 
hearers : Right is not simply my side of the question. 
Right is God's side of the question ; and the only way 
I can be sure I am right is to be perfectly sure I am 
on God's side. The right thing to do in any issue is 
the will of God. Hence, these eighth century 
prophets have a message for us to-day. 

Follow the same idea over into the New Testament, 
and here is what you find. There are three kinds of 
righteousness taught in the New Testament, and not 
one only. There is imputed righteousness, which 
means the righteousness God sets down to my ac- 
count when I accept Christ. There is imparted 
righteousness, which means that by regenerating a 
man, God by His Spirit gives him a new moral life. 
Then there is attained righteousness, which means 
that man must win righteousness also by effort. We 
must work out what God has worked in. 

In the light of these facts, if a man has the right 
philosophy of life, he must believe that righteousness 



THE STABS BEYOND THE SMOKE 49 



(or what is the same thing, the Divine Will) shall 
ultimately prevail in every contest on this earth. Ah, 
in the dark days of the great conflict, when the line 
of the Western Front bent so far that it nearly broke, 
this was the faith which nerved those splendid braves 
to fight with their backs against the wall, to " carry 
on " in spite of an enemy armed to the teeth and 
hard-boiled to the soul. They were somewhat like 
the young recruit who was reproved by his sergeant. 
His uniform was on wrong, and he carried his rifle 
like a hay-fork. So the sergeant said : " Let's see 
if you can march. Right about face." The recruit, 
not knowing what the command meant, stood his 
ground, and heaved a sigh of relief, and stood stock 
still. " Thank goodness/' he said, " I am right about 
something anyway." Like the young recruit, the 
Allies stood stock still and said, " They shall not 
pass." They knew they were right about God's 
eternal purpose, and straightway they refused to turn 
right about face. And so the line held, not because 
our men were stronger, but because it was held by 
the righteous hand of a holy God. The Psalmist said, 
" Thy righteousness is like the great mountains," and 
the enemy stormed that mountain in vain. 

* We know that the truth shall triumph, 

That evil shall find its doom ; 
That the cause of right, though subdued by might, 

Shall break from the strongest tomb; 
That wrong, though it seems to triumph, 

Lasts only for a day, 
While the cause of truth has eternal youth, 

And shall rule the world for aye ! " 



50 THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 



77. Another Great Word is Repentance. 

Do you see how my second point logically follows 
the first ? What else could follow it ? First, the will 
of God. Right is held up before the nation, — before 
all nations. Fancy the nations of the twentieth cen- 
tury placing themselves, their selfish diplomacy and 
their rotten intrigue, up against the Ten Command- 
ments and the Sermon on the Mount. What think 
you they will do? They will blush for shame, and 
fall upon their knees and cry, " God be merciful to 
us, sinners." This was the experience of Isaiah: 
" In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. 
Then said I, ' Woe is me.' " That is the program of 
every sincere soul, whether individual or corporate. 
First, I see God. Then I see myself. And when I 
see myself I say, " I abhor myself in dust and ashes/' 

" Well," but you say, " can a nation repent ? " 
Certainly, for a nation is just an enlarged indi- 
vidual. There is a very curious parallel between the 
ancient Pharisees and the modern Prussians. His- 
tory, you know, is fond of repeating itself. The 
Pharisees looked upon their law as a kind of contract 
with Jehovah, by the terms of which God could be 
compelled to give the Jews the empire over the whole 
world as soon as they could succeed in fulfilling the 
law without a mistake. They had a saying that if 
the Jews could succeed in keeping two Sabbath days 
with complete adherence to all ceremonies, then God 
would be compelled to intervene and set up the empire 
of the Jews. This intervention was expected to be a 
stupendous miracle. The heavens were to open, and 
armies of angelic warriors were to come in chariots 



THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 51 



of flame. The Scribes and Pharisees were to be the 
rulers of the world, and all pious Pharisees who had 
died were to rise from the dead and live on forever 
as part of the ruling caste. There were scores of 
Apocalypses in circulation which expressed this hope. 
You remember the war literature of the Central 
Powers, and you see the parallel to which I refer. 
The " good old German God " was believed to be 
their special ally, and He was to give them world 
rule as soon as they cleansed the promised land of 
their enemies. Hence Germany to-day must be not 
only beaten, but repentant. 

Here, then, is the call for the prophet. The mod- 
ern prophet must tell the nations just what the eighth 
century prophets told the Pharisees : that God has no 
pets, " In every nation, he that feareth God and 
worketh righteousness is accepted of Him." God has 
no nationality. God cannot be confined within 
geographical divisions. The Almighty is not in- 
terested in geographical lines, but in ethical lines, 
right and wrong. It makes no difference what the 
colour of your skin or the shape of your flag may be. 
You have got to toe the mark of God's holy law, and 
if you have done wrong as a people, you must repent. 
" Now if that be treason," said the ancient prophets, 
and say we to-day, " make the most of it." When 
the war was two years old, the Archbishops of 
Canterbury and York, realizing the critical issues of 
the time, decided that a great national mission of re- 
pentance and hope was the measure best calculated 
to meet the needs of Great Britain. And so in the 
autumn of 1916 the ministers of the Church of Eng- 



52 THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 



land went up and down the lands of the crown and 
called upon the people to repent. There were some 
who felt at that time that the date was not opportune, 
and that it would have been easier to wait for the 
reaction of the peace days for the victorious nation to 
express its repentance. At any rate, it is high time 
for us in these days to call the nations to their knees. 
For as Joseph Hardy said, " The only way a people 
can really advance is on their knees." Now that the 
hurrahs of victory have come, lest we lose ourselves 
in the excitement of our returning soldier boys, let a 
sense of the awful folly of four wasted years keep us 
sober. A great international chorus will have to 
learn the words of Kipling's Recessional : 

" The tumult and the shouting dies, 
The captains and the kings depart ; 
, Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, 

A humble and a contrite heart: 
Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget, lest we forget." 

777. The Third Great Word is Sacrifice. 

True repentance leads to sacrifice. False repent- 
ance stops in sorrow. That is the difference. Look 
at the case of Isaiah once more. After humiliation 
came consecration. "Then said I, 'Woe is me/ " 
But did he stop there? No, he went on: "Then 
said I, c Here am I ; send me/ " This is exactly 
the difference between the two New Testa- 
ment words for repentance: metamellomai, and 
metanoia. If you know which word is used in 
the Greek New Testament, you can tell whether the 
repentance is going to get any further than the hand- 
kerchief or not. The first one means " to change the 



THE STARS BEYOND THE SMOKE 53 



feelings " but the second one means " to change the 
mind or will." When Cat ch-my-pal- Patterson gets 
an audience on its feet to register their resolution con- 
cerning the use of strong drink, he does not let them 
stop with the emotion of anger against drink. He 
asks them to double up the right fist, punch an imag- 
inary antagonist, and say in unison, " We will see this 
thing through." It is high time that the Church, in- 
stead of stopping half-way on its crusades of Salva- 
tion, should double up its fists and say : " We will see 
this through, the whole program : Righteousness, Re- 
pentance, Sacrifice." 

The world has a new idea of service since the war. 
We have been preaching service ever since Jesus 
practiced it, but somehow the old world kept on say- 
ing : " We are not impressed by your sermons. Have 
you a book of acts ? " Then came the war with such 
incidents as this : Word came to me that the only son 
in the wealthiest family in the city of my former 
parish had fallen in France. How often that beautiful 
estate and mansion were the envy of the passers-by ! 
And yet how aimless seemed the life which was lived 
in that home, with a succession of teas and recep- 
tions and diners-dansants ! Then war was declared. 
The father, who had seen military service years be- 
fore, went into the army as a general, and the boy, 
the only son of the home, went into the aviation serv- 
ice and fell at his post. As I thought of it I said: 
" No amount of wages would have made that father 
and son go. No appeal to fame would have made 
them risk their lives. But the call to serve, to serve 
their country and their fellow-men, pulled them from 



64 THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 



the mansion to the trench." Oh, my friends, we need 
no laboured theology now to explain to people what 
service means. We can simply say : " Look at the 
trenches: there is an illustrated sermon, a moving 
picture, of Service First, and Safety Last." 

Ministers themselves, the men whose very title 
means service, have rediscovered the idea. Recently 
we read of a clergyman at the front who sold stamps 
to the glory of God. The Y. M. C. A. with which 
he was quartered was long on speakers but short one 
secretary, and the minister consented to substitute at 
the latter job. But after a few days he was ready 
to go home. He said : " Any cheap clerk can do this 
work. It is not big enough for me." The Building 
Secretary answered : " I am sorry you find no chance 
to get your message over as you sell your stamps, for 
I find I can put nearly all of First John into a wink." 
Then the Secretary sketched the varied avenues of 
service, and the minister saw a new light. He said, 
" From this time on I mean to be the postage stamp 
apostle." And so this man found an evangelistic 
way of selling stamps. He discovered that ministry 
is greater than preaching. Our friend, Dr. Selecman, 
found the same thing. He said there was precious 
little chance for preaching, but a big opportunity for 
service ; and he, for example, spent three whole days 
at the dictaphone, getting off some of the letters to 
the sweethearts and relatives of the soldier boys re- 
quested of him. Our other good friend, Dr. Free- 
man, is spoken of as " the best loved man in France 99 ; 
and why ? Would you know the secret ? Here it is. 
I asked him what he did over there, and he said: 



THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 55 

" Better ask me what I didn't do. If there is any- 
thing I did not do, I don't know what it is." I was 
told by another that if there was any task too mean 
or hard for any one else, they gave it to Freeman, 
and he did it. 

What is all this that I have been saying, brethren, 
but a commentary on the new idea of service which 
is taking possession of the world? The magnificent 
paradoxes of Jesus are not poetry after all, but com- 
mon sense. A man has only what he gives away, 
and the harder he works the happier he is. May God 
hasten the day when this policy of unselfish service 
shall dominate the home, the store, the city, the state, 
the nation, and the world! When that time comes, 
we shall be answering our Lord's Prayer : " Thy king- 
dom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in 
heaven." 

IV. Another Great Word is Faith. 

Many reports from the battle front have told of 
the singing of birds amid the roar of strife. It is 
said that when the great guns were roaring and the 
big shells bursting, the birds could be heard filling 
in the interim between detonations with their melody. 
Now, why did they sing? Wasn't it because there, 
up above the smoke where the air was clear, they 
could see the sunshine and could know that God still 
lives, and would still take care of them ? Well, then, 
I wonder if it is not possible for the Christian to rise 
on wings of faith above the storm and see God above 
the battle, and hold on to Him. "If, as some one 
has said, " life is a tragedy to those who think, and 



56 THE STABS BEYOND THE SMOKE 



a comedy to those who feel, it is a victory to those 
who believe." " This is the victory that overcometh 
the world, even our faith." Faith can " trace the 
rainbow through the rain, and feel the promise is not 
vain, that morn shall tearless be." One of the most 
suggestive Gospel incidents for the Christian in these 
reconstruction times is our Lord's conversation with 
Peter, in which He says : " Satan hath desired thee, 
that he might sift thee as wheat. But I have prayed 
for thee, that thy faith fail not ; and when thou art 
converted, strengthen the brethren." Here are three 
things which our Lord tells Peter, and which He is 
certainly telling His Church to-day. The first is this : 
" These are sifting times, and many are being led to 
believe that God has gone to sleep, or else has re- 
signed His throne. Many are being carried away 
from their old moorings." The second thing Jesus 
says to Peter is, " But your faith must not fail, and 
I am praying for you." If our faith cannot stand the 
test it will be discounted. The world will say to 
us : " Oh, don't talk to me about a clear-day religion. 
Anybody can believe in God on a perfect day in June, 
when the sky is clear and the roses bloom. What we 
want is a faith that will weather the winds of No- 
vember and the snowy blasts of December." Then 
the third thing Jesus tells Peter is, " When you are 
once sure of yourself, go out and strengthen others." 
So, my Christian friends, your supreme task is not 
merely to be sure of God yourself, but to be an evan- 
gelist of conviction and certainty to somebody else 
whose feet are slipping from the rock, the Rock of 
Ages. 

Some poet has pictured a number of shipwrecked 



THE STAES BEYOND THE SMOKE 57 



pilgrims who had found shelter on a little beach, 
gathered at nightfall, and discussing the losses their 
lives had known. One bewailed the friends of early 
days. Another, the money which had once been his. 
Another, the plans which had gone all awry. And so 
they went on, one by one. 

" But when their tales were done, there stood among them 
one, 

A stranger, seeming from all sorrow free; 
1 Sad losses ye have met, but mine are sadder yet : 
For the believing heart has gone from me.' " 

Oh, Church of God! Keep your lamps burning 
to-day. Don't let the world have to fight its way 
home in the dark. "If the light that is in thee be 
darkness, how great is that darkness ! " Take the 
aeroplane of trust, and soar above the smoke, and tell 
us what you see up there ; and then come down to us 
in the trenches and behind the lines, and bring us a 
wireless from heaven which will help us " carry on." 
Catch some of the calm of heaven, and bring it down 
to our fevered pillows. Heaven's good Book says 
that if He giveth peace, no one can make trouble. 
So, Church of God, while our enemies multiply war 
without, do thou multiply peace within. Then shall 
our burdened brothers and sisters be able to say : 

" We bless Thee for Thy peace, O God, 
Deep as the unfathomed sea, 
Which falls like sunshine on the road 
Of those who trust in Thee. 

"That peace which suffers and is strong, 
Trusts where it cannot see, 
Deems not the trial-way too long, 
But leaves the end with Thee/' 



IV 



THE MINISTRY FOR THE CHURCH OF 
TO-DAY 

" Who am I, O Lord God, that thou hast brought me 
hitherto?"— 2 SamuEi, 7: 18. 

WHAT do you think of a man who would 
sit down in the presence of God? That 
is what David did in the story before us. 
He was simply overwhelmed. Nathan had just told 
him that his dynasty was assured of a long reign, and 
his house should be established forever. And the 
king is so filled with emotion that he does a thing 
which is nowhere else in Scripture said to have been 
done. He went in and sat down before the Lord, 
and talked over his problem. He feels his utter un- 
worthiness of the great time in which he lives. And 
so he passionately exclaims, " Who am I, O Lord 
God, and what is my house, that thou hast brought 
me hitherto? And is this the manner of man, O 
Lord God? For thou, Lord God, knowest thy serv- 
ant." 

It seems to me, my brethren, that you and I, min- 
isters of Jesus Christ, may well make these words our 
own, as we find ourselves in the position of moral 
leadership in the days of rebuilding. Are we big 

58 



THE MINISTEY OF TO-DAY 



59 



enough men for our job? The times demand giants, 
and We dare not be pygmies. Are we able to trans- 
late the mind of the Eternal into the language of the 
people ? Can they look up to us, or will they pass us 
by? Dr. Chapman says these are the greatest days 
for preaching the world has ever known ; and are we 
measuring up to our opportunity? The Captain of 
our Salvation has placed us on the moral firing line ; 
and shall we turn and run ? The marching orders are 
clear: " Speak unto the children of Israel, that they 
go forward. ,, And shall we reply, " I pray thee, have 
me excused "? God calls for volunteers to carry the 
war into the enemy's country; and must we answer, 
" Here am I ; send somebody else " ? No, we dare 
not be clerical slackers. As somebody has said, " The 
exemption of the clergy from military service was 
either an insult or a challenge." It was an insult if 
it implied that they were weaklings. But it was a 
challenge if it meant that the work of the ministry 
was so important that it was an essential. Let us 
accept the mighty challenge, and resolve from this 
good hour that we shall stretch ourselves up to the 
dimensions of our opportunity : so that in the end we 
may be able to say, as Paul said to the Romans, M I 
have fully preached the Gospel of Christ." 

A great deal of criticism has been heaped upon the 
ministry because, forsooth, they have been found 
wanting in this hour of need. One clergyman writes 
an article on " Peter sitting by the fire warming him- 
self," and gives the impression that the clergy of the 
country are lazy old men, equipped with dressing- 
gown and a pair of easy slippers, lounging in a rock- 



60 THE MrSTISTEY OF TO-DAY 



ing-chair before a cozy fire. Will any one who knows 
the facts dare believe this indictment to be true? A 
very good reply has been made to his article on the 
subject, " Peter Warmed Up," in which it is pointed 
out that there was no crime in Peter's warming him- 
self, but the question is, what he did after he got 
warm. This reminds us of Thoreau, who said : " It 
is not enough that I collect sticks and make myself a 
blaze. The point is, what I did after I got warm." 
Yes, by all means let the prophets of the Lord get 
warmed up — God help the ecclesiastical refriger- 
ators — and then let them go out and pass on their 
new-found spiritual temperature to others. Bishop 
McDowell tells of an eminent scholar of England who 
a few years ago became for the first time in his life 
acutely conscious of darkest England and its needs. 
All his life had been devoted to learning and teach- 
ing, and he had not realized how the other half lived. 
When he finally saw with his own eyes human need 
and poverty and distress on a large scale, he was over- 
whelmed. All his scales of values were suddenly 
upset, and the things he had striven for seemed as 
naught. In the consciousness of this new discovery 
he cried aloud: "Greek must go, and scholarship 
must go, but men must not go ; they must be saved." 
So, my brethren, in these days of reconstruction and 
earthquake, there are certain things which must go, 
and certain things which must abide. It is with the 
idea of indicating to you some of the things which 
must not be thrown overboard that I venture to 
speak to you of some of the essential notes of the 
ministry of the days to come. 



THE MINISTEY OF TO-DAY 61 



/. A Ministry of Comfort. 

I had a rich experience one day in October of 1918. 
It was in connection with the first gold star to come 
to our flag of 125. Word came to me that the dear 
brave mother who had told me her Paul was wounded 
a few days before had received a wire from the Lieu- 
tenant saying he was gone. So I went over to the 
house. The mother met me, brave as a lion. She 
showed me first the wire that came telling of Paul's 
being wounded, from him himself. Down in the 
corner was penciled her reply : " Proud of you. 
Not worrying at this end. Love. Mother/' Then 
she showed me the second wire, which spoke of the 
supreme sacrifice. And then, what do you think? 
She smiled through her tears, and told me that the 
thing on which she had been living during the days 
of uncertainty and anxiety was my sermon of the 
Sunday before. I had preached on " Patient En- 
thusiasm " : " Let us run with patience the race that 
is set before us : " and I spoke of the endurance which 
comes from looking unto Jesus. I could see she had 
it all by heart. How glad I was that I had preached 
on that theme that day rather than on the sins of the 
Amalekites or the Imprecatory Psalms ! There were 
many other handclasps beside hers at the close of that 
sermon; and I remember one man who had been 
described to me as a Silurian, who broke into tears 
telling me he was going through deep waters, thank- 
ing me for the lift. 

Well, my brethren, these things are not new to 
you. Wasn't it Alexander MacLaren who said that 
if he had his ministry to go over, he would make one 



62 



THE MINISTRY OF TO-DAY 



important change: he would preach more fully than 
he had a Gospel of Comfort ? Do you remember what 
Lavisse, the greatest historian of France to-day, said 
when Renan's " Life of Jesus " was published? " It 
did not interest me," he said, " and one reason was 
that the Christ of Renan was not a Christ who had 
comforted men/' He conceived the possibility of an- 
other life of Jesus which should describe the Christ 
who had strengthened and cheered men's hearts in 
every clime and nation of the world. These are the 
sentiments, by the way, of one of the Freethinkers of 
France. 

God pity us if we fail in this hour. People come 
to our pulpit stairs and look piteously up and say, 
" What have you got for a broken heart, O man of 
God ? Is there no balm of Gilead, is there no physi- 
cian there? If you have anything for us, in God's 
name give it to us. Do not tantalize our misery by 
false pretense." What can we say to that appeal? 
We have a Christ who is adequate for the hour. 
The question is, has Christ a channel in you and 
me which is adequate for Him? Give your peo- 
ple the Comfort Chapter, the Fourteenth of John, 
as an antidote for anxiety. Tell them that the 
word " comfortless " means orphaned. " I will not 
leave you orphaned." Make them believe that the 
world they are living in is not an orphan asylum, 
but a Christian home. Give them the paregoric of 
the Gospel. Jean Valjean said he wanted to live 
" where people say Good Morning to one another." 
And to-day the broken-hearted want to live where 
their minister can say to them not merely "Good- 



THE MINISTEY OF TO-DAY 63 



morning," but as the boys used to say in the trenches, 
"Cheerio:" "Be of good cheer." "Let not your 
hearts be troubled." " I have overcome the world." 
" Come unto me." 

How close this ministry of comfort will draw us to 
our people and to our God ! I like the spirit of that 
man who wrote when he was leaving one parish for 
another : " I find all this immensely costly in wrenched 
heart-strings. Rare are the homes in which I have 
not stood bowed in grief with the folks. Few are 
they, young or old, with whom I have not sat in 
sacredly close council over serious problems, pains, 
and joys. . . . Only God is able to comprehend 
the vastness of that for which the ministry stands in 
its manhood and message as the saving influence in 
modern life." 

//. A Ministry of Conviction. 

We ought to be dead certain about a few things 
when the boys come home. Some preachers are dead 
(in earnest), and others are dead-in-earnest. It 
makes all the difference where you put the pause. 
We must not meet the returning soldiers with an 
" if." They don't want to hear our doubts. They 
have been up against stern realities over there — such 
real things as pain and death and immortality. They 
won't want a religion with strings tied to it when 
they come back. They will want to hear a man who 
has the courage born of conviction. They will de- 
mand what they call the " real thing." Dr. Halsey, 
of the Presbyterian Foreign Board, tells of an inci- 



64 THE MINISTKY OF TO-DAY 



dent of the war in which groups of mutinous soldiers 
seized women and girls and bore them off to their 
villages to lives worse than slavery. In one case 
after a number of women had been seized, the Cap- 
tain cried out: " Are any of you Christians? If so, 
stand out and we will shoot you, that we may have 
no trouble with the missionary." One brave young 
girl stood out from the line and said, " I am a 
Christian." " Go back/' said her captor, " you are 
the real thing." And she was. Our soldier boys 
have risked their lives and jeopardized themselves 
unto death for America. They will expect a minis- 
try which will risk itself to the death for Jesus 
Christ. If we are not prepared to adventure all for 
Him, we had better get out of the job. 

My point is that we ought to be definitely certain 
about a few essential things, and minimize the rest. 
We must have a creed, but let it be as simple as 
possible. One of the fallacies which the war has 
exploded is the old axiom that " It makes no differ- 
ence what a man believes; only his actions count." 
The war has shown that it makes all the difference in 
the world what a man believes, for a real man will 
act out what he thinks in. Creed and conduct are 
closely related. The New York Peace Society some- 
time ago published " The Creed of the Huns " in 
words quoted entirely from the Germans themselves, 
even the title. Germany had a creed. She had certain 
convictions which she cherished all through the years. 
And the most flagrant acts of the war were the cold 
working out of creed into conduct, of belief into 
action. If the Huns were willing to die for their 



THE MINISTKY OF TO-DAY 



65 



convictions, ought not the ministry to be willing to 
live for theirs ? 

I love to hear men preach who seem to be standing 
on the solid rock of a few great truths. It is much 
more inspiring to hear a man say " I know whom I 
have believed," than to hear him say, " I have a 
suspicion that critical investigation will yet authenti- 
cate the historicity of Jesus Christ." It is surely more 
heartening to hear a sermon on the text, " The gates 
of hell shall not prevail against the Church," than to 
listen to a discourse on " Will there be any Churches 
ten years from now? " I love to see a man standing 
four-square to all the winds that blow, even if I 
cannot stand by his side. I can well appreciate the 
attitude of Hume, the great skeptic, with regard to 
Whitfield. Hume, on his way to hear Whitfield 
preach, was stopped by a friend on the street. Learn- 
ing where Hume was going, the friend naturally 
expressed great surprise, and exclaimed: "Why do 
you go to hear him? You do not believe what he 
preaches." The answer of the skeptic was signifi- 
cant : " No, but he does, and that is the reason I like 
to hear him." So I suggest, my brethren, that we 
have an intellectual house-cleaning, and that we take 
stock of ourselves and our beliefs, so that we can 
meet the years of Reconstruction unafraid and say: 
" Here are the things that have come through the 
fire. They still hold. You have read them by the 
watch-fires of the camps in the glare of the war 
light, and I have read them in the headlines of the 
extras and in the good old Book. Come, let us get 
back to where we believe something, and where we 



66 



THE MINISTRY OP TO-DAY 



believe it terribly — terribly enough to live for it, 
terribly enough to die for it if need be." 

777. A Ministry of Cooperation, 

Two churches in the city of Chicago united to form 
one congregation about the same time that the mili- 
tary authorities decided to brigade our American sol- 
diers alongside the English and French soldiers of 
more experience. The subject of the opening sermon 
in the new combined church was, " Brigaded To- 
gether." Wisely did the minister apply the philos- 
ophy of the trenches to the life of the churches. 

Brethren, the moral is clear. One of the biggest 
by-products of the war is to be along the line of 
ecclesiastical cooperation. Witness one or two inci- 
dents by way of illustration. When the new colours 
of the 304th Field Artillery were dedicated at Camp 
Upton, they were blessed by a Bishop of the Prot- 
estant Episcopal Church, a Vicar General of the 
Roman Catholic Church, and a Rabbi of the Jewish 
Church. The New York Evening Mail was moved 
to comment upon this singular event, which it called 
" the outward symbol of an important fact in our 
new religious life." Or, take the situation disclosed 
in the first Training School for Chaplains at Fortress 
Monroe, where seventy preachers lived together in 
peace and harmony for five weeks without breaking 
one another's heads or hearts with ecclesiastical de- 
bates. There were nineteen Methodists, thirteen Bap- 
tists, twelve Roman Catholics, eight Presbyterians, 
four Congregationalists, four Episcopalians, and on 
through the list of practically all the denominations, 



THE MINISTEY OP TO-DAY 67 

even to the Salvation Army. One Presbyterian min- 
ister slept for the five weeks with an Irish Catholic 
on one side of him and a Methodist on the other, and 
yet did not engage in a single discussion of apostolic 
succession or the freedom of the will. The same 
attitude was still further emphasized at the Front. 
A Baptist minister played the organ at midnight 
mass for a Roman Catholic priest, and loaned his 
room for the hearing of confessions. A young man 
who returned to this country from driving an ambu- 
lance said that the man who brought his mail every 
morning had been a chauffeur in New York, while the 
man next to him was a professor in the University of 
Chicago. On the other side his neighbours were a 
Russian count who had been living in America, and a 
bright lad from a New England high school. Such 
instances as these could of course be multiplied in- 
definitely. They remind us of those days of ancient 
Rome of which the poet wrote : 

" Then none was for a party ; 
Then all were for the State ; 
Then the great man helped the poor, 
And the poor man loved the great." 

Will the men who have returned from scenes like 
these wax enthusiastic over the " Five Points of Cal- 
vinism/' or the " Thirty-nine Articles " ? I trow not. 
They will not be interested in our divisions, but in our 
relations. They have seen in the Y. M. C. A. a 
picture of the Christian Church lifted above its petty 
divisions and ministering in Christ's name. When 
the hour of stress came, here stood the denomina- 
tions, riven asunder, pitifully looking at one another 



68 THE MINISTKY OF TO-DAY 



and wondering what to do. The Government could 
not recognize any one at the expense of the others, 
but the Y was ready in the name of an undenomina- 
tional Christ to step in and do the job; and so the 
Churches said : " Go ahead and represent us, and we 
will all unite to give you the necessary money to do 
the work." And the Y. M. C. A. will never hereafter 
have to beg for money for any enterprise, for it has 
laid the world everlastingly under obligation to it for 
its willing service. Would God the Churches had 
been organized to place themselves on the map of the 
world's workers! 

But it is never too late to mend. Now is the time 
for the new viewpoint. Away out in China ten 
denominations have coalesced into one, because these 
Chinese brethren were challenged to the act by the 
immensity of their task and the demand for Christian 
efficiency. He was wise who said that if church 
unity ever came, it would move from the circumfer- 
ence to the center. That is precisely what it is doing. 
First the missionaries were its heralds, and then the 
trenches were. From these two points on the far- 
flung circumference, the idea is driving home. God 
grant that the Hindenberg line of denominationalism 
may fall before the Allied advance of Christ's brother 
men who are trying to answer His prayer that we all 
may be one, that the world may believe that God sent 
Him ! It is related that out in India they were con- 
sidering the preparation of a catechism to be used by 
the missionaries. One Indian Episcopal Bishop is 
said to have suggested a union catechism which would 
have in the body of the book the points on which they 



THE MINISTEY OF TO-DAY 



69 



all agreed, and in the appendix the points of dif- 
ference. One delegate wisely remonstrated that he 
would accept that suggestion, provided that before 
the catechism was printed an operation for appendi- 
citis should be performed on it, and the appendix cut 
out and the body allowed to remain. The world war 
was an awful surgeon, but it cut out many theo- 
logical and ecclesiastical appendices. Let us hope 
the patient may speedily recover, and be stronger and 
better than ever. 

IV. A Ministry of Moral Leadership. 

I Crave for the ministry the distinction of being the 
leaders of thought and achievement in every great 
moral issue which presents itself to the minds of the 
American people. Scientists are naturally looked to 
by the people to decide some debated scientific ques- 
tion. Economists are supposed to be supreme in the 
realm of Economics, and so on throughout the realm 
of human interest. But the ministry are reputed to 
be the guardians of the public morals, and thus the 
moral leaders of the community. The State ought 
to be given to understand that, while the Church does 
not propose to dabble in politics, yet we are on the 
lookout for the moral bearing of every great issue, 
and we will not be laughed out of court in the future, 
nor be bribed into silence, nor be damned into in- 
significance. 

The call is for pioneers, moral captains, who will 
lead on in advance of the troops. Frederick Edwin 
Smith, Attorney-General of Great Britain, after 
pointing out some difficulties in the path of the 



70 



THE MINISTEY OF TO-DAY 



League of Nations idea, has said : " It is worth while 
trying for an ideal. It is better to hitch your wagon 
to a star than to a machine gun." That is the issue. 
Somebody must go ahead and be laughed at. Who 
better than the ministers? If they say we are trying 
to light the way to Utopia, tell them in the words of 
a modern statesman : " Well, you know what war is ; 
it is hell; and Utopia is preferable to hell." If you 
shrink from the lonely task of leadership, my brother, 
remember that you are the lineal descendant of the 
Old Testament prophet, and that the prophet has been 
described as the man who wields a sword in one hand 
and holds a door open with the other, fighting off the 
enemy until a few followers have passed into the 
opening beyond the door. Remember that you are 
called to be a saint, and that the saint is the man who 
is cannonaded this side of death, and canonized the 
other side of it. Hence, don't be surprised at the 
shells. 

But what a challenge it is, men ! The old ecclesiast 
described himself in this way: " I, the preacher, was 
king over Israel in Jerusalem; " and the Anglo-Saxon 
word king is connected with the root konnen. He is 
the man who can. Can we? That is the question. 
Can we lead, or must we follow ? Can we originate, 
or must we imitate? Who of us was brave enough 
to preach on the League of Nations until it became 
popular? As Dr. Faunce says: "Fifty years ago 
men whispered it in peace conferences, and were 
ignored as harmless visionaries. Twenty years ago 
diplomats and statesmen began to look into the matter 
with languid interest. Now we are swept toward 



THE MINISTRY OF TO-DAY 



71 



some such organization by irresistible tides." Yes, 
it is coming now, but were we bold enough to preach 
it when it was not popular? There are many other 
great questions to-day and somebody has got to be 
bold enough to dare stand in his pulpit and speak his 
mind, even if the Church is full of Jennie Goddesses 
armed with camp stools ready to throw at him. Are 
we afraid of camp stools and cabbages and criticism ? 
If so, better quietly walk out the back door and go to 
selling life insurance. It is better to be a success as 
a camp follower than to be a failure as a captain. 
Captains of thought are needed, Generals of public 
opinion, Marshals of the International Mind. These 
are to be the saviours of society — but saviours are 
usually crucified. 

The war has shown that humanity is willing to be 
led to heights of great enthusiasm and splendid sacri- 
fice when some big program is flung at it, great 
enough to demand its attention. Men have bought 
bonds who never have thought of investing their 
money at four per cent. Women have given days and 
nights to knitting sweaters and making Red Cross 
bandages who were never known to think of anything 
beyond the card-table before. Business men not iden- 
tified with any church have poured checks into the 
coffers of the Y. M. C. A. and kindred organizations. 
Yes, and splendid millions of men, with their hearts 
set on great careers, with everything to live for, have 
found something bigger still to die for. Oh, no ! 
Humanity is not totally depraved. There are still in 
the human race some hints of that splendid stuff that 
the poet had in mind when he wrote : 



72 THE MI1TCSTKY OF TO-DAY 



" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers, ' Lo, thou must,' 
The youth replies, * I can/ " 

Our problem, brethren, is to generate the same 
enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God, with all it im- 
plies, that the patriotic spell-binder temporarily gen- 
erates in the hearts of his audience — an enthusiasm 
which shall give our returning heroes the moral 
equivalent of war, and shall convince them that the 
Church as well as the State is worth living for, and 
if need be, worth dying for. 

I know that many will tell us that this pioneering 
is no business of ours. They will tell us to stick to our 
last, and to " preach the old Gospel," by which they 
mean a refrigerating gospel rather than an invigorat- 
ing gospel. But that is because they do not see the 
vision we see. We can only " follow the gleam/' 
and resolve to be " obedient to the heavenly vision." 
If we do, we shall capture the leaders of the coming 
years. If we do not, they will outdistance us, and 
we shall find ourselves in the rear rather than in the 
van of public opinion. God grant that Robert Louis 
Stevenson's, words may never be written either of us, 
or of any of our returned and relapsed heroes : 

" The frozen peaks he once explored, 
But now he's dead, and by the board ; 
How better far at home to have stayed, 
Attended by the parlour maid ! " 

V. A Ministry of Illumination. 
A clergyman who was leaving for Camp Kearny 
for a series of addresses to the men advised with a 



THE MINISTEY OF TO-DAY 



73 



brother minister who had been there as to the nature 
of the subjects he ought to discuss. The reply in 
substance was : " Tell the boys what we are fighting 
for and against. They are very vague about it all." 
Since that time this idea of illumination and educa- 
tion has found systematic expression. On a larger 
scale, my brothers, this must be done by the pulpits 
now. Many things are clearer in the retrospect than 
in the prospect. The afterglow lights up the dim 
places ; " When they were escaped, then they knew 
that the island was called Melita." This mother who 
loaned her boy to the Government, and whose loan 
turned into a gift, will want to be mighty sure why 
he did not come back, and just what he died for. 
These taxes that will have to be paid for many long 
years yet may be paid with a smile instead of a frown, 
if we can let a little sunshine in on them. These 
pages of history that are to be studied with such 
eagerness by the next generation may well have a few 
moral foot-notes or running comments by ourselves, 
for the pulpit as well as the professor has a right to 
discuss a Christlike war. " Because the preacher 
was wise, he still taught the people knowledge," was 
written by the ancient ecclesiast, and it ought to be 
written also of his modern successors. For example, 
just to illustrate this ministry of illumination, it will 
be easy for some critic of the Church to make capital 
out of the fact that the Church failed to prevent the 
war in some diatribe of the after years. It will be in 
order for the preacher to be able to reply to this 
critic that the Church was not the only institution 
which failed in the crucial hour. The Church is sim- 



74 THE MINISTEY OF TO-DAY 



ply one of the brothers of humiliation, all of whom 
have failed. Here is Science, for example. Why, 
instead of keeping off the war, she bent all of her 
energies to make it the more deadly. The Church, at 
least, did not do that. Here is Diplomacy. We 
thought she had advanced so far that her Hague Tri- 
bunals would never again permit war. But she had 
not. Here is Socialism. She had heralded far and 
wide the warning that French Socialists and German 
Socialists would never kill each other. But they did. 
We don't throw Science and Diplomacy and Social- 
ism to the wind because they failed. No, we still 
believe in Democracy in spite of the Russian excesses, 
and we still believe in the Church in spite of Protes- 
tant and other divisions. 

It is necessary for somebody to take large views of 
the situation. Men have come back from the trenches 
who have seen the war from their little sector, but 
know nothing of Marshal Foch's larger vision. Their 
vision will need correction for fear of moral astigma- 
tism. Interpreters of Scripture are arising on all 
sides with prophecies of the end, and every event is 
fitted into its appropriate cubby-hole. Advocates of 
municipal ownership have their arguments, and pri- 
vate capital has its say. Somebody must stand far 
enough off from the noise of the many cannon to hear 
the whispers of God. Somebody must go to Head- 
quarters and get the message which is to be passed on 
to the people busy down in the trenches of Readjust- 
ment. Who shall get it and pass it on if not we? 

These are only a few of the characteristics of the 
ministry needed to-day. What shall we do as we 



THE MINISTET OF TO-DAY 



75 



face them ? " Who is sufficient for these things, O 
Lord?" "Who are we, O Lord, that thou hast 
brought us hitherto? " Brothers of mine, we are not 
sufficient, but He is. Do you remember that experi- 
ence of Moses when he lost the chance of his life to 
become a great orator ? God told him what he would 
have to do, and it scared him. " O Lord," he said, 
" I can't do this. Why, I am a very poor public 
speaker." And God said, " You go ahead, Moses, 
and make a try at it, and I will be with your mouth." 
But he persisted in refusing, until God finally said: 
" Very well, then ; I will send Aaron your brother 
along ; I know that he can speak." And Aaron made 
Moses so much trouble (as assistant pastors often 
do) that I think he wished many times he had fol- 
lowed God's plan instead. Let us profit by this ex- 
ample. My consoling belief is that God never con- 
fronts a man with a task without stretching his man 
to the dimensions of the task. He never brings a 
man into a hard place, and then runs away and leaves 
him there. So we may confidently step out into the 
taxing demands of the New Day ahead, well assured 
that He who called us into the ministry of the Gospel 
of Jesus Christ is able to complete that which He has 
begun, to the end that we may finish our course with 
joy, and the ministry we have received of the Lord 
Jesus. 



A NEW DECLARATION OF INTERDEPEND- 
ENCE 

"For we are members one of another" — Ephesians 4:25. 

IT is related that when a certain artist was deco- 
rating a church, Michael Angelo entered and 
glanced around. He saw that all the figures 
were too small. Thereupon seizing a piece of chalk, 
he stepped up to the wall and drew a head in proper 
proportion. Then he wrote the word Amplior, which 
means larger. This is the word I am trying to write 
to-day into the hearts of our people as we draw near 
the time of our annual patriotic celebration. On 
July 4, 1776, the Thirteen Colonies declared their in- 
dependence, but at the same time, without knowing it, 
they declared their interdependence; for at the very 
time they declared their independence of the Mother 
Country they also declared their interdependence on 
one another. Franklin put in the truth very well in 
the unforgetable words, " We must all hang together, 
or else we shall hang separately." 

Now it seems to me, my friends, that this larger, 
longer, broader word is the word for the hour to-day. 
We were a young country, an infant among the na- 
tions, when we set up in business for ourselves. 
Now, it is always characteristic of infants that they 
are independent. They think they own the earth, and 

76 



A NEW DECLAEATION 77 



it is only by having their hands slapped repeatedly 
that they begin to discover that others have rights. 
So for a long time our young country took a position 
of isolated dignity. We were told to " avoid entan- 
gling alliances/' We kept to our side of the street. 
When the patrol wagon ran down the streets of 
Europe to arrest the naughty boys who had been 
fighting, our good mother called us in and pulled 
down the blinds, so they could not arrest us for com- 
plicity in the fray. But after a while the fight was 
carried into our block. Some of our own neighbours 
were hurt, and we felt we could not stay up in our 
roof-garden any longer gazing at the mountains and 
the stars. And so down from the roof-garden and 
out through the sun-parlour we marched into the 
street; and there we mixed up in the fray, for our 
neighbours were calling for help, and we discovered 
that we were members one of another ; citizens of the 
world. Once having taken part in the fight, w^ can- 
not go indoors again. We are out here on the street 
to stay, because sympathy and altruism and helpful- 
ness are part of our national make-up. 

You may have heard the story of the ship captain 
who stood cn deck one night, gazing out into a raging 
sea. Peering out over the foaming billows, he saw in 
the distance signals of distress. He called to his men 
to man the boat and launch out into the deep. Some 
of the men came back discouraged from the first at- 
tempt, and said to him, " Captain, we will never come 
back ; " whereupon the old hero's eyes flashed as he 
said : " We don't have to come back. Launch out 
and away." So, my hearers, as you look at the stars 



/ 



78 A NEW DECLAKATION 

on yonder Service Flag, pray if it be God's will that 
our brave, splendid boys may come back ; but remem- 
ber that they don't have to come back, for they have 
gone to their brother's aid, and " we are members 
one of another." 

Will you stop with me for a moment and think 
your way through this thing? You will then discover 
this fact of interdependence staring at you from every 
nook and corner. Run through a single day of your 
busy life, for example. You get up in the morning 
and telephone your office. Yes, but you are depend- 
ent on " Central " for your connections. Declare 
your independence of the telephone company, and see 
where you will land. Then you come down-stairs 
for your morning paper lying on the porch. Yes, but 
you are dependent on the fidelity of the delivery boy. 
If he has shirked, it won't be there. Then you go 
into the breakfast-room for your morning meal, and 
what a chain of cooperating agencies has been at 
work to prepare for you that simple meal ! You have 
coffee from Java, and wheat from Kansas, and syrup 
from the corfi-fxdds of Louisiana, and fruit from 
Florida perhaps. Why, look at the people it took to 
mine the silver for your teaspoon, and polish it, and 
get it ready for your use. A small sized army prob- 
ably has been at work on your table-linen, to get it 
ready for you from the time the flax was sown until 
the moment the maid spread the linen table-cloth on 
your table. Look at what a congregation of people 
it took to get you your breakfast. Why, you can't 
get through one day in modern life without the co- 
operation of hundreds or thousands. Don't you see 



A NEW DECLAKATION 79 



clearly that we are members one of another ; and that 
the only man these days who can issue a declaration 
of independence is the savage who kills and cooks his 
own food, and makes his own bed, and is his own 
chauffeur and telephone operator? 

Emerson long ago saw the coming of this fraternal 
day. He said that the merchants ought to bring their 
dollars, and the farmers their corn, and the poets 
their song, and the women their sewing, and the la- 
bourers their willing hands, and the children their 
flowers. The world to-day is doing that very thing in 
cosmic proportions. A woman in France discovers 
radium, and instantly the whole civilized world is 
ablaze with excitement, and scientists thousands of 
miles from France have to revise their text-books. 
A man in India discovers that plants are sensitive 
through and through, and at once a California florist 
who never saw India begins to experiment. A mis- 
sionary goes down into Africa and carries the Gospel 
of the Cross, and at once the price of rubber rises in 
all the markets of the world. A petty Balkan 
quarrel makes one man kill another in a little town 
the world had never heard of, and the result is a uni- 
versal war. The price of my sandwich on Main 
Street, Los Angeles, is raised because a man named 
William Hohenzollern in Berlin was mad with am- 
bition. I wish the Kaiser would keep his hands off 
my sandwich, but he won't, because he and I happen 
to live on the same planet; and, strange as it may 
seem, he and I are members one of another. I am 
not especially proud of some of the members of my 
family, but my text holds true just the same. I want, 



80 A NEW DECLAKATION 



therefore, to point out for our consideration three 
great spheres of existence in which the truth of the 
text appears. 

/. There is the Fact of Interdependence in Hu- 
man Life. 

Who was the first heretic of history? Cain. He 
was the first man ever tried for heresy, and he was 
judged and condemned by God Almighty. What was 
his heresy ? Was it some doubt with reference to the 
character of God, or the creation of the world? Or 
the partaking of the forbidden fruit? No, it was 
none of these things. What was it? You have the 
heresy written out in Genesis 4:9: " Am I my 
brother's keeper?" The first heresy was the denial 
of brotherhood. It was an anarchistic declaration of 
independence. It was cold-blooded selfishness. That 
was the first heresy. It did not relate to God, but to 
man. The individualist was the first slacker. Cain 
was the first alien enemy on record. He had but one 
personal pronoun in his vocabulary, and that was the 
first person, singular number — I. He was an I-spe- 
cialist of the first rank. 

But Cain was not the only heretic. Ay, there have 
been many others. Another example not so well 
known was Jabez. Read his prayer as you find it in 
the fourth chapter of 1 Chronicles. Here in giv- 
ing us a mere list of names the chronicler pauses to 
pay his tribute of respect to this righteous man Jabez, 
and he was an honourable man in many respects. 
But if you read his prayer you will find that he men- 
tions himself five times in thirty-three words. The 



A NEW DECLARATION 81 



mistake of Jabez was in forgetting to pray for others. 
He seems to have forgotten that prayer was to be 
used as a party-line, a number of voices all thrown 
into one great Central at the Throne of Grace. He 
insisted on individual service. 

Well, Jonah made the same mistake ; and I pick out 
just these three for purposes of illustration. Jonah 
forgot that he was related to the Ninevites, just as the 
German Kaiser forgot that he and his people were re- 
lated to the rest of the world, and that therefore the 
hurt of one injures all the rest. We are members of 
one another, and if you hurt one member of an organ- 
ism all the rest of the organism feels it. That is what 
Cain, and Jabez, and Jonah, and William Hohenzol- 
lern temporarily forgot. But they all learned it later. 
Stevenson said years ago that we were all "little 
islands calling out to each other across seas of mis- 
understanding." Perhaps we used to be, but now we 
are great cities connected by trunk lines; and if you 
have a wreck on one part of a trunk line, all the other 
towns on the same line suffer ; for if the train is late 
at one place, it is late at all the others. If you have a 
break in the telephone or telegraph wire at one point, 
the whole line is useless until the break is repaired. 
We are members of one another, and the sorrow of 
one is the sorrow of all, and the joy of one is the joy 
of all. 

It is a strange and sad fact, my hearers, that the 
captains of industry seem to have sensed this fact of 
fraternity and cooperation long before the Church or 
the State. For example, the chairman of the United 
States Steel Corporation announced last year what 



82 A NEW DECLARATION 



might be called the Gospel of Trade, when he said 
that he would advocate cooperation among all the 
countries of the world. Now, if cooperation is good 
for nations, it is equally good for individuals. About 
a century and a quarter ago in Boston, a well-known 
statesman, and an equally well-known Doctor of Di- 
vinity were seriously discussing the condition of the 
colonies, each of which was trying to set itself up in 
selfish independence of the others. The result was 
a feeble civic life in all of them ; and the preacher at 
last broke out in a sort of desperation and said: 
" Well, I will tell you. We must federate." He did 
not mean that they must at once declare themselves 
as the United States of America, but that they must 
begin to live as though they were members of one 
another — relatives, in other words. That sounds like 
a very commonplace suggestion these days, but it was 
revolutionary then. The Thirteen Colonies did fed- 
erate, and the result is the greatest Union in the world 
to-day. 

Well, we are trying to do the same thing in the 
Church. One of the most thrilling hours of a recent 
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church was 
when the. fraternal delegates from the Disciples 
Church appeared before the Assembly and suggested 
that we, in Christ's name, ought to be one. Dr. 
Washington Gladden, who had advocated unity so 
long, sent a special message to the Assembly in which 
he said that he was glad to have lived long enough 
to see the happenings that took place that day. I be- 
lieve Jesus wants to get the scattered members of His 
great family together, for He said in His High- 



A NEW DECLAKATION 83 



Priestly prayer, " That they all may be one, that the 
world may believe that thou hast sent me." 

It seems to me that cooperation is good business 
sense also. I stood the other day at the bedside of 
one of the officers of my church. He had been hit 
by an automobile, and his limb gave him excruciating 
pain. He sent for his family physician, who is an 
allopath, and he gave him medicine. My friend said 
that an osteopath was coming the next day to see 
what he could do ; and I made the remark : " Won't 
it be a great day for medicine when the different 
kinds of paths — the allopaths, and the homeopaths, 
and the osteopaths, and the cheiropaths, and all the 
others — recognize and admit that there is much truth 
in all of their schools, that none has a monopoly of 
learning, and that instead of being enemies they are 
really members one of another, brothers in the great 
task of healing the open sores of the world's suffering 
and need ! " Then when that day comes will be ful- 
filled the vision of Isaiah, who foretold the time when 
every one should help his neighbour, and every one 
should say to his brother, " Be of good courage/' for 
the carpenter should encourage the goldsmith, and 
the smoother of iron encourage the smiter of the 
anvil, saying, " It is ready for soldering." That is 
the Christian interpretation we need in all lines to- 
day. 

It seems so hard to get people to believe this. A 
practical experiment was made some time ago by Mr. 
Roger Babson, of the Babson Statistical Laboratory. 
He said they tried to put into operation some plans 
which assumed that the people of the community uu- 



84 A NEW DECLAEATION 



derstood that the welfare of each is dependent on the 
welfare of all, but he found that less than five per 
cent, of the people believed any such proposition. 
Then he decided that he must go further back and 
begin to train the minds of the young in the public 
schools, and teach the children cooperation. But 
there again he met with failure, because, as he says, 
" the schools are operated as a machine with religion 
barred out." So he found it almost impossible to 
get men to accept this principle until they came to 
accept it, as we do to-day, first of all as a great re- 
ligious fact. Oh, when men come to believe that they 
are members of one another, and children of the same 
Father in Heaven, then they will work out this prin- 
ciple of fraternity in every sphere of human life. 

You remember how beautifully Whittier enforced 
this lesson in his poem, " The Two Rabbis." The 
story is very simple, but the lesson is worth while. 
The Rabbi Nathan, who had lived a blameless life for 
twoscore years and ten, fell into sin. Thereupon he 
left his seat among the elders, and decided to go and 
confess his wrong to Rabbi Ben Isaac. As he made 
his way to Ecbatana, he found his brother Rabbi 
kneeling in the shadow of a holy tomb. The two men 
clasped each other to their hearts, and then when 
Rabbi Nathan said, " Pity me, O Ben Isaac, I have 
sinned," the second Rabbi stood awestruck himself, 
for he confessed his own guilt, and he too asked for 
the prayers of his brother Rabbi. And there, side by 
side, they knelt in the low sunshine by the turban 
stone, and each man forgot his own agony in praying 
for his brother. 



A NEW DECLAEATION 86 



" And when at last they rose up and embraced, 
Each saw God's pardon in his brother's face. 
Heaven's gate is shut to him who comes alone; 
Save thou a soul, and it shall save thy own." 

77. This Great Fact of Interdependence Applies 
Also in National Life, 

The Bible is an international Book. You get a 
beautiful picture of international cooperation away 
back in i Kings, when the description of Solomon's 
Temple is given. There is a significance there for us 
to-day, for the fact simply is that the Temple could 
not have been built except for the friendly relations 
existing between the kings and people of Israel and 
Tyre. The Hebrews were farmers, and the Tyrians 
were mechanics and seafarers. So the kindly rela- 
tions between the two nations made it possible for 
Hiram's people to bring down their magnificent trees 
to Palestine for the Temple; and then in turn, the 
people of Tyre were able to live on their rock-bound 
hills, because they received the surplus farm products 
from the Hebrews. Mutual necessity brought the 
two nations together in mutual service. 

It is well for us of the Church to insist in these 
days when Internationalism is being so much dis- 
cussed, that one of the prime factors in the growth of 
Internationalism has been Religion. Let us see how 
this came about. In primitive times there were many 
gods. Each people of course believed its own god 
to be the true one. These various gods were sup- 
posed to be jealous of one another, and to incite their 
followers to hate other gods and their followers. 
Under these conditions there was almost constant 



86 A NEW DECLARATION 



warfare among the believers in different deities. 
Now when polytheism passed into monotheism, broth- 
erhood was enlarged, for each group of people looked 
upon believers in their own god as brothers, for they 
regarded themselves as the offspring of their deity. 
This meant that all believers in the same God were 
protected by the whole tribe or clan. Therefore, 
when other people came to believe in their God, they 
became their brothers. Hence, when the monotheism 
of the Jews passed over into Christianity, the bounds 
of religion were extended to include all nations, and 
the command was to go and baptize all people. 
Therefore, you see that the Early Church was the 
world's first great international institution, and For- 
eign Missions becomes simply the inevitable result of 
sound logic, a piece of world statesmanship. For if 
God is one, and all people are children of God, then 
all men are brothers, and then of course there is no 
limit to my human interests, because my world is 
bounded, as somebody has said, on the north by 
the Aurora Borealis, and on the south by the Frozen 
Pole, on the east by the Rising Sun, and on the west 
by the Day of Judgment. 

Next to religion another factor ought to be men- 
tioned, and that is the extension of blood kinship. In 
early days friendship was limited to people of the 
same kin. This meant first that the family would 
love each other, because the same blood was in all 
their veins. Gradually the family developed into the 
clan, and the clan into the tribe ; so that when a for- 
eigner was made a member of a given tribe, the cere- 
mony of transfusion of blood was gone through with 



A NEW DECLABATION 87 



to show that he was henceforth literally of the same 
blood as his fellows. Here is where the Old Testa- 
ment finds the ancient Jews. They were just a col- 
lection of tribes when they first appeared in the Bible, 
and so you hear about the Ten Tribes and the Twelve 
Tribes. In process of time, kings were given to the 
people, for the purpose of welding the scattered tribes 
into a nation. Now, if you will open your modern 
history, and lay it beside your ancient history, you 
will see that precisely the same historical development 
has taken place in Germany, and Italy, and France, 
and England, and Spain, that took place in Israel. 
They have been unified into nations by development 
from early tribes. Up to this point the principle of 
my text has been accepted in the world. We are 
members one of another — we Italians, we French, 
and we Germans, because the same blood flows in our 
veins. There the progress has stopped, however; 
and for years the nations have been walling them- 
selves in, and building up their armies and their 
navies. 

There have been prophets of a better day, however, 
appearing at various times all through the years. 
Dante with his " Monarchia," Henry of Navarre with 
his " Great Design," William Penn with his plan for 
the United States of Europe, Immanuel Kant with 
his idea of " Eternal Peace," — all these men have ar- 
gued for a state of nations, a federation of the world. 
Goethe in his day insisted that Science and Art be- 
longed to all the world, and before them the bound- 
aries of nationality must disappear. Socialism has 
maintained the same thing ; and it is very interesting 



88 A NEW DECLAKATION 



to observe that at the Socialist Conference at Amster- 
dam in 1904, at the very time when Russia and Japan 
were at war, there was one delegate from each of 
these warring nations, and these two delegates sat 
side by side, referring to each other always in 
courteous and friendly terms. But it is not only 
Socialists, and artists, and scientists, that have the 
international viewpoint; but preeminently, Christians 
must have it. We must give our food, our inven- 
tions, our literature, our scientific discoveries, but 
most of all, our Christ, — to the world. We have no 
right to feast on Christ, and let the other nations 
starve for lack of Him. And so I found on a recent 
Sunday evening, when we were preparing for a serv- 
ice of international friendship, that the only appro- 
priate hymns in our books were missionary hymns. 
Foreign Missions is the great international business 
of the Church, and Foreign Missions will never again 
need to be defended. In the days when we as a na- 
tion avoided entangling political alliances, I can see 
how the religious separatist would have had good 
ground for his argument that we must avoid entan- 
gling religious alliances. But now his argument is 
gone, for we are not merely the United States of 
America, we are part of the United States of the 
World. So the world must speak a new language 
henceforth, the universal language of love ; and must 
have a new standard of ethics and morality, the 
standard of Jesus Christ. 

Here, then, is the uniqueness o£ our situation to- 
day. Jesus Christ stands out on the highway of the 
world's hatred, towering above the walls which na- 



A NEW DECLABATION 



89 



tions have built around themselves, saying : " Carry 
the principle of cooperation on to its logical conclu- 
sion. Let the same interdependence which enlarged 
you from a tribe into a nation enlarge you from a 
nation into a world brotherhood. You say you be- 
lieve in one blood. Very well. My Father hath 
made of one blood all nations of the world. The 
same blood flows behind your fence that flows behind 
the fence across the way. The only trouble is, you 
insist on having a margin of indifference, a highway 
of hate separating you, a kind of No Man's Land 
running between you, and you won't let the blood 
cross. What you need is transfusion of blood, and 
not loss of blood. Take hold of one of my hands, 
each of you, and let me be the peacemaker between 
you, for only by way of the Cross will you become 
one. 

Do you know that when Jesus came the first time, 
two thousand years ago, the whole civilized world 
was under one political rule, and that this was the 
first and only time in the world's history that it has 
been so? The nations were knit together in the 
bonds of commercial interdependence, and it was the 
only time when preachers of the Gospel found trade 
routes ready to their service, and the only time in 
history that one could journey from Ireland to the 
Euphrates, and from the Baltic Sea to the Desert of 
Sahara, without encountering a single custom-house. 
The internationalism of the world came at the same 
time as the great international Man, Christ Jesus. 
That is a very suggestive fact. But that was the in- 
ternationalism of one great dominating power. What 



90 A NEW DECLAKATION 



we want to-day is the internationalism not of Im- 
perialism, but of Democracy. Tennyson was the 
prophet of this new and greater internationalism, 
when he sang: 

" When the schemes and all the systems, 
Kingdoms and republics fall; 
Something kindlier, higher, holier, 
All for each, and each for all. 

"All the full-brain, half brain races, 
Led by Justice, Love, and Truth; 
All the millions one at length, 
With all the visions of my youth. 

" Earth at last a warless world, 
A single race, a single tongue. 
I have seen her far away, 
For is not Earth as yet so young? 

"Every tiger madness muzzled, 
Every serpent passion killed ; 
Every grim ravine a garden, 
Every blazing desert tilled. 

" Forward, let the stormy moment, 
Fly and mingle with the past; 
I that loathed have come to love him ; 
Love will conquer at the last." 

///. This Same Great Fact of Interdependence 
Applies Also in the Spiritual Life. 

One Sunday Sir George Adam Smith sat talking 
with me in my study before going down to preach at 
the morning service. We fell to discussing some of 
his past experiences. He referred to some pulpits in 
which he had been denied a hearing because, forsooth, 
he was not a rabid advocate of a certain theory of the 



A NEW DECLARATION 



91 



Second Coming of Christ; and finally he said: 
" What is the use of always talking about His coming 
in the future, when He is here in my heart to-day ? " 
Then he told me of a man who wrote him a letter, one 
of these men who, in Dr. Francis' happy phrase, 
" uses the Bible as a Santa Fe time-table/' and can 
tell you just when Jesus is going to come, and just 
where His train is going to stop ; and this man signed 
himself, " Yours in the coming of our Lord." Sir 
George said that he replied to the letter, and signed 
himself, "Yours in the power of the indwelling 
Christ." I think the reply was a very good one. 

The incident emphasizes what I am trying to say in 
these closing words. Paul, in this fourth chapter of 
Ephesians, from which my text is taken, uses the fig- 
ure of the body. He compares the Church to the 
body of Christ, representing it as a great organism — 
not a clumsy piling together of parts as in a scrap-pile 
or a junk-heap, but as an organism, unified and domi- 
nated by one common life. You can go over the 
battle-fields of Europe and pick up countless dissev- 
ered limbs and arms and bodies and feet, and lay them 
mechanically in the proper relative position; but out 
of them all you will not be able to manufacture one 
man, for they are not members one of another ; they 
are members of different bodies ; there is no common 
life current flowing through them. So Paul holds 
that the Church is not a fortuitous concourse of theo- 
logical atoms, but a building, with all its parts per- 
fectly fitted into one beautiful and complete structure. 

Jesus uses another, and an even more beautiful 
figure than Paul. If Paul compares the Church to a 



92 A NEW DECLAEATION 



building, Jesus compares it to a vine. If Paul says 
we are members one of another, Jesus says we are 
actually members of Him. On that never-to-be-for- 
gotten night, when Jesus held His last long conversa- 
tion with the disciples, He may have had the idea 
suggested to Him by a, fragment of a vine which made 
its way through the open window. Others believe 
that Jesus, on His way to the garden, went to take a 
farewell glance at the Temple, and that He directed 
the attention of His disciples to its golden vine. 
However the thought came, the figure is exquisitely 
beautiful. We are branches of the vine, and only as 
we abide in Him do we bring forth fruit. 

Do you remember how the Gospel of John traces 
the three steps of progressive intimacy between Jesus 
and His disciples ? In the thirteenth chapter He calls 
them servants. Now you know a servant lives in the 
house with you, but is not a member of the family. 
Then in the fifteenth chapter He calls them friends. 
Now a friend may be entertained in your home, but 
he does not abide there. But in the twentieth chapter 
of John, after the Resurrection, Jesus calls His dis- 
ciples brethren. Now, a brother is a member of your 
family. The same blood is in his veins and yours. 
He probably abides in your home. So Jesus offers to 
be your brother and mine. In the light of this figure, 
do you wish to declare your independence of Jesus 
Christ, or your interdependence on Him? Is it not 
time that we Christians made a new declaration, espe- 
cially in this hour, of our absolute and utter depend- 
ence on Him? Just rest on Him the burden and 
meantime abide in His love. When my little son 



A NEW DECLAEATION 93 



climbs up into my machine, and I drive down through 
the devious avenres of city traffic, he simply leaves to 
me the direction of the zzr. He does not worry at 
all, because he abides in my love, and trusts me to see 
him through. He is a member of my family, a mem- 
ber of me, and he knows I would sooner die than be- 
tray the trust he reposes in me. If I am thus faith- 
ful to the little soul which abides in me, do you not 
think Christ will be faithful to those who put their 
trust in Him ? 

The other night at the Midnight Mission, some of 
us went down to say a few words on the occasion of 
their anniversary. After the addresses, when the in- 
vitation was given, several men came forward and 
knelt at the altar-rail. I went up and talked with one 
man, and asked him if he were a Christian, and he 
said, " Yes/' he had been one for several months. I 
then asked him if he had openly confessed Christ by 
connecting himself with some church, and he said 
" No." I told him I thought he would find it easier to 
continue in the Christian life if he took that open 
stand. "Oh," he said, "a fellow can hold out all 
right if he tries." Then I assured him that he could 
not hold out in his own strength; and some words 
came to my mind, and I close my sermon this morning 
with the same words which I quoted to the poor penti- 
tent at the Mission : 

" My brother, you fear that you cannot hold out ; 
Trust self, and your hope is gone : 
The motto of Christ for those who doubt 
Is not ' Hold out ' but ' Hold on/ " 



VI 



CORN AND THE NEW MOON, OR 

BUSINESS AND RELIGION 

" When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell 
corn ?"— Amos 8:5. 

MY text tells of a time when religion inter- 
fered with business. It is the protest of 
commercialism against mysticism. It sees 
no use in the suspension of traffic for holidays. It 
is the cry of the corn-merchants who are compelled 
to sit with idle hands and lose trade until the day of 
the new moon be over. And while the terms may 
sound antiquated, yet the fundamental idea behind 
the question is as much in evidence in the twentieth 
century as it was in the time of Amos : " When will 
the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn ? " 

The Book of Amos is a tract for the times. In 
fact we are beginning to discover that the Minor 
Prophets are alive with the discussion of problems 
which face us to-day. They cut so close home that 
many of the men in our pews do not like to hear the 
text announced from their pages. I remember a 
New York clergyman, who told me that he was fond 
of reading and preaching from the Major and Minor 
Prophets, and that some of the financiers in his flock 
finally remonstrated with him requesting a discon- 
tinuance of this practice — with the ultimate result 
that he resigned his pastorate. You can't please some 

94 



COEN AND THE NEW MOON 



95 



of our modern congregations better than never to 
mention this portion of God's word. 

Now this rude herdman of Tekoa whom we know 
as Amos got himself into a good deal of trouble by 
reproving the pride and luxury of the people of his 
time. His denunciations offended not only the priest 
of Bethel who reported him to the king as a disturber 
of the peace, but the Wall Street men also. I fancy 
Amos wasn't very popular on " change." I imagine 
the newspapers ridiculed and mercilessly cartooned 
this prophet of calamity. I shouldn't wonder if the 
Board of Commerce passed unanimously a set of reso- 
lutions asking him to leave the city and take his re- 
ligious observances and his holidays with him. But 
he refused to move a step and so the only recourse 
the merchants had was to whine — and this is a very 
whining text, "When will the new moon be gone, 
that we may sell corn ? " 

What is this new moon to which these Jewish 
traffickers took exception ? It was one of the annual 
feasts instituted by Moses, on which day the people 
must blow trumpets over their burnt offerings and 
their peace offerings. And it was a far more im- 
portant day than it is with us, for committees were 
sent out to catch the first rays of the new moon, and 
as soon as they sighted it, they announced the fact by 
fires on the Mount of Olives, and the watchers on 
neighbouring mountains, catching the signal, lighted 
in turn their fires and soon all the heights were aflame 
with the good news that another cycle of thirty days 
had begun. All labour was halted and the people 
were rallied anew to allegiance to Jehovah. 



96 



CORN AND THE NEW MOON 



The point of the text, then, is that religion had 
touched the pocketbook, and when it gets to that point, 
it always hurts. The stock-brokers were perfectly 
satisfied for Amos to preach religion, if he wanted to, 
but they didn't want him to interfere with their reve- 
nue. They were impatient to get back to work. 
The Fourth of July never did anybody any good, any- 
way, and the Sunday blue laws were a nuisance. 
The people who wanted new moons were welcome to 
them, but as for themselves, they wanted to sell corn. 

Now, I propose to consider this thought of Corn 
and the New Moon as setting forth the relation of 
Business and Religion. Let us discuss some of the 
questions suggested by the text : 

/. The Pressure of Business. 

You will notice that there is a great assumption 
underlying this text, which is either true or false. 
If it is true, then the plaint is entirely justified. If 
it is false, then it ought to be corrected. That as- 
sumption is: that the main purpose of life is to sell 
corn. The New-Moon holidays have to be endured 
as a necessary evil, but we must get back to the corn 
as quickly as possible. It is the thought which Mark 
Twain put into Adam's diary supposedly narrating 
his experiences in the Garden of Eden. When he 
comes to Sunday, time seems to hang heavy on his 
hands, for the record is : " Sunday — pulled through." 
And I suppose there are many modern Adams w T ho 
just manage to pull through Sunday, and are happy 
only when they are back at their desks on Monday. 
Now, there is another possible assumption : and that 



COKN AND THE NEW MOON 



97 



is the main business of life is the New Moon and the 
religion for which it stands — and that we sell corn 
simply between times as a means of making a living. 
These are the two extremes of materialism on the one 
hand and mysticism on the other — and between the 
two every one of us somewhere finds his place. 

I think we shall admit, without any debate, at the 
outset, that modern life has too much corn and too 
little moon. One of our writers says that there is 
more care and fret in a year of New York City than 
in a century of Hindustan. We have long since 
wiped out of our business calendars many of the 
ancient Hebrew holidays, and we have all we can do 
to keep those required by law still remaining. In 
fact we Americans have invented so many new nerv- 
ous diseases that we have had to invent a new re- 
ligion, Christian Science, to cure them. There are 
too many exhausts and too few exhilarators in our 
modern machinery. To borrow the automobilist's 
figure : we Americans travel in high speed too much. 

Only glance at our life and its high pressure : Our 
forefathers had to quit work at sunset — but we have 
lighted our offices with the electric light and can have 
it bright as day at midnight, if we will. The Pull- 
man sleeper makes it possible for us to travel and 
sleep at the same time. The wireless telegraph keeps 
us in touch with our office even when we are vacating 
on the great ocean. The Sunday excursion enables 
us to take an outing on God's day without taking any 
time off from our business — we simply take it off 
from the Lord. To be sure, the eight-hour day and 
the child labour laws and the Socialist party and the 



98 COKN AND THE NEW MOON 



labour organizations are doing what they can to com- 
pel more time for the New Moon, but Corn still holds 
the day to a great extent. Charles Stelzle, who 
knows the labouring men so well, says that the motto 
of many a working man is still " Meat, Malt and 
Mattress/' that is to say, food, drink and a place to 
sleep — and not much place for New Moons in such a 
program as that. 

One of our ministers tells of spending several 
months in south France with a young man who had 
made money at fever heat in New York, going almost 
wild in the craze of the market — corn, corn, corn; 
and then his doctor ordered him over to the salubrious 
climate of southern France, to spend his hard-earned 
dollars in the vain effort to get well again. What a 
common story that is: of the man who has no time 
for the weekly Sabbath moon of rest, or the daily 
evening moon of repose or the monthly new moon of 
an occasional holiday, and then he finds out too late 
that all these moons were but the kind provision of a 
wise creator who knew man needed the periodic rest 
He gave. 

The San Francisco World's Fair decided to give 
the world a needed lesson. It is rather strange that 
none of our previous World's Fairs impressed our 
religion on the sightseer. We had all sorts of ex- 
hibits of art and education and industry — but it was 
all corn. San Francisco decided that the world 
should know that we Americans have some Moons 
here also — and so they planted in the midst of the 
great exhibition a lasting symbol of our faith and 
loyalty to the god of the New Moon. It is sad that 



COKN AND THE NEW MOON 



99 



the idea should be so new — and yet I'm afraid that 
many foreigners are much more impressed by our 
business than our religion, for our sky-scrapers are 
much more in evidence than our churches. John 
Kelman wisely said, " God pity that city or country 
whose smoke-stacks rise higher than its church 
steeples." 

We may well emulate the spirit of Kipling's prayer: 

" For heathen heart that puts her trust 

In reeking tube and iron shard — 
All valiant dust that builds on dust, 

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard ; 
For frantic boast and foolish word, 

Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord. Amen." 

//. The Necessity of Fixed Seasons of Rest and 
Worship. 

My second point follows logically upon the first. 
For if we grant the tendency of business to usurp the 
whole life, we see at once that the only defense, the 
only guarantee that religion will receive its fair sham 
of time, is in the existence of fixed and definite 
seasons which are set apart for its observance. 
Therefore, before you rail at the New Moon holiday, 
just stop and observe that if it were left to our caprice 
and if we didn't have the recurring monthly day to 
remind us of it, we should probably slip over our 
holiday altogether and the first thing you knew we 
should be a moonless people whose one object in life 
was the cultivation and the sale of corn. 

Just here is the answer to those critics who ob- 
ject to the enforcement of all Sabbath laws. They 
say that no outside authority, the government or any- 



100 COKN AND THE NEW MOON 



body else, has any right to compel them to rest one 
day in seven, but that this weekly rest should be left 
to the individual conscience. Right here is the an- 
swer: It is a great principle of pedagogy that law 
must do for children what they will not do for them- 
selves — and we are all children of a larger growth. 
And it has been proven by experiment that man needs 
certain new moons ever so often for rest and wor- 
ship — and the history of the world has also shown that 
man left to himself will become so engrossed in his 
struggle for a living that he will neglect those halting- 
places along the path of life — and so the State has to 
come in to the aid of the Church, in defense of the 
common welfare. 

America is witnessing right now the contest be- 
tween the Corn and the New Moon. The pessimist 
is the man who says the corn is going to win, and the 
optimist insists that the new moon is going to win. I 
believe the optimist is right. I recall a sentence of a 
recent essayist in the Atlantic Monthly — he exclaims, 
" Somehow the religion of Christ has got loose again 
in our world." Taking this assertion as my point of 
departure, I began to test its truth — and I call your 
attention to some of the things I discovered. Be- 
ginning right here in America, I read an editorial 
from the Wall Street Journal which said among other 
things : " What America needs more than railway ex- 
tension and western irrigation and a low tariff and 
a bigger wheat crop and a merchant marine and a 
new navy, is a revival of piety; the kind father and 
mother used to have — piety that counted it good 
business to stop for daily family prayers before 



COKN AND THE NEW MOON 



101 



breakfast, right in the middle of the harvest; that 
quit work a half-hour earlier Thursday night so as to 
get the chores done and go to prayer-meeting; that 
borrowed money to pay the preacher's salary, etc. . . . 
What is this thing which we are worshipping but a 
vain repetition of what decayed nations fell down and 
worshipped just before their light went out? Great 
wealth never made a nation substantial nor honour- 
able. ... It takes greater and finer heroism to 
dare to be poor in America than to charge an earth- 
works in Manchuria. ,, What do you think of that 
for a Wall Street sermon? It is just an amplification 
of my text and says in substance this : " Don't founder 
on corn, as other nations have done, — Rome and 
Greece and the rest of them, — leaving nothing to 
posterity other than their broken ruins glimmering in 
the moonlight." Well, I discover that the same thing 
is echoed in the pages of the French press — and that 
one of the hopeful signs of the present day is a re- 
action toward vital religion in France. About the 
time that the separation of Church and State became 
effective in France, there broke out a series of mur- 
derous crimes, to such an extent that the city govern- 
ment had to provide dogs for the protection of its 
officers. This comment was made by an observant 
citizen : " What else can you expect ? We have ex- 
pelled a Church that was effete, but as a nation we 
cannot live secure without religion." 

When we turn from France to India, the story is 
the same: The Bengal Trade Association has peti- 
tioned the government to provide some religious in- 
struction in the government colleges. " If," they say, 



102 COKN AND THE NEW MOON 



" you cannot give Christian instruction, at least teach 
them their own faith, Hindu or Mohammedan, for 
no people can exist without religion." In the light 
of such facts as these, I hold that John Fiske is justi- 
fied in his dictum that religion is " the largest and 
most ubiquitous fact connected with the existence of 
mankind upon the earth," — as the scientist says, " an 
inevitable element in human life." 

It is a very noteworthy fact that the philosopher 
Comte, the very man who had predicted the fatal ex- 
tinction of the disposition to religion in the human 
soul, ended his career by founding a new religion 
clumsily copied from the Roman Catholic. Some 
of his disciples tried to excuse their master by say- 
ing that he had gone mad — but he hadn't at all — he 
had gone sane — he had discovered that the soul in its 
outcry for a God was not to be silenced by the empty 
words of philosophy any more than it is to be fed on 
husks of corn which the swine do eat. After all, the 
difference between swine and manhood is this: that 
swine are perfectly content to stay in the far coun- 
try as long as you will fill them with corn ; — but man- 
hood staggers home bruised and bleeding to its God. 
Which do you prefer, husks or moonlight? 

III. The Endangered New Moons of the Pres- 
ent Day. 

Sometimes it looks as i£ an eclipse of the moon 
were darkening our land. I would remind you of 
some of the moons which are in danger of being 
eclipsed by the clouds of commercialism. There is 
the New Moon of Childhood, for instance. Oh, I be- 



COEN AND THE NEW MOON 



103 



lieve increasingly in child labour laws. Any of you 
who studied the exhibits at our Conservation Expo- 
sition which pictured the tragedy of precious rose- 
buds sacrificed on the altars of American greed, will 
never forget the awful picture. Stand by the doors 
of any of our great factories at the closing hour and 
watch the streams of stunted and blasted and wrecked 
lives issuing forth from the mouth of this devouring 
demon of iron and steel — and you will see that while 
we are making corn, God knows we are paying dearly 
for it. And God pity the revenues which are piled 
up out of stolen boyhood and girlhood, to swell the 
bank account of some magnate who already has more 
corn than he knows what to do with. 

Then there is the New Moon of Business Depres- 
sions. Oh, how much we heard about in such ab- 
normal years as we have been passing through! 
Business men on every corner were asking, " When 
will the new moon be gone that we may sell corn ? 99 
If our revenues are not up to the top notch every 
month, we complain. Now granted that there may 
be a periodical shrinkage, may it not do us good? 
Three crops a year, so the farmers tell us, will wear 
out the soil. Time and again when I have asked why 
yonder field is lying idle, I have been told that it is not 
idle but is resting that it may do all the better the 
next year. Why, even a razor — so a California barber 
told me, will do better work if it is allowed to rest 
on Sunday. And freight crews that rest one day in 
seven have been proven to do much better and much 
more work than those who work every day and all 
day long of a moonless week. 



104 



COEN AND THE NEW MOON 



Then there are the National New Moons. Many 
foreigners would insist on working on the Fourth of 
July and the twenty-second of February and the 
thirtieth of May unless they were withheld by the 
strong arm of law. For they figure it is better to add 
to the contents of their cash-drawer than it is to in- 
crease the diameter of their soul. Like the man af- 
flicted with both cold and fever, who said he would 
stuff the cold and let the fever starve a while, so they, 
being afflicted with both a soul and a body, resolve to 
stuff the body and let the soul starve a while. 

Then, too, there are the New Moons of the Re- 
ligious Life. Oh, brethren, don't let them go — they 
are a good investment — even Wall Street says so — 
statesmanship says so — history says so — your experi- 
ence says so. Let the people who want to worship 
the Corn-god go to darkest Africa or the depths of 
heathendom somewhere and like the other savages 
build themselves an idol, wood or stone or corn, — the 
material makes no difference. But let us tell them 
distinctly that as long as they live in America, they 
must observe the holiday of the New Moon. And let 
us warn all these immigrants, Jews, Europeans, 
Asiatics,. Barbarian and Scythian, bond and free, that 
while they are at liberty to elect whether they shall 
come to America or not, once having decided to come 
here, they must expect to revere the institutions of the 
land — and if they are caught stealing any of our 
Moons, they will be prosecuted for criminal robbery. 

Then, finally, there is also the New Moon of Per- 
sonal Bereavement. The other evening I sat in a 
sick-room and talked with a woman who had been 



COEN AND THE NEW MOON 



105 



sick seventeen years — and who for four years had 
been unable to lift her right hand to her face. I tell 
you, as I saw the mist of tears when we had finished 
our prayer of comfort, I couldn't blame this child of 
God if she had said: " When will the New Moon be 
gone that I may sell corn?'' Well, blessed be God, 
the tedium of the New Moon is lighted by His pres- 
ence, so that His child can 

" Trace the rainbow through the rain, 
And feel the promise is not vain, 
That morn shall tearless be." 

IV. The Sad Plight of a Restless Age. 

What was the upshot of the controversy suggested 
by the text? Why, the sequel was that the corn- 
merchants won their contention and forgot the trou- 
blesome moon-holidays and became so adept at sell- 
ing corn that the Jew the world over is known as a 
shrewd financier. But there is also another sequel: 
God kept His word — and He had fairly warned them 
that if they did not allow the land to enjoy its Sab- 
baths, He would deprive them of their land and send 
them into captivity — and so you have the sorry spec- 
tacle of the wandering Jew, a traveller up and down 
the earth, with plenty of corn but nowhere to enjoy 
it. Byron in his Hebrew Melodies puts it well : 

" The wild dove hath her nest, the fox his cave, 
Mankind their country, Israel but the grave." 

There is something very pathetic to me in the his- 
tory of the Jews. It is strange to see their stores 
closed on Saturday and open on Sunday — it is a kind 
of silent protest at the Christian civilization by which 



106 COEN AND THE NEW MOON 



they are surrounded — a kind of advertisement of the 
fact that they don't belong here. Now I raise the 
question: Shall a similar fate befall us? Shall 
America find herself carried into captivity because 
she has forgotten to rest and to worship the eternal 
God and to observe His New Moons? Be not de- 
ceived — God is not mocked, for whatsoever a nation 
soweth, that shall it also reap. 

I know no better example to follow in this respect 
than that of the Man of Galilee. He lived the moon- 
lit life. When the Sabbath came, He went as His 
custom was into the synagogue regularly for wor- 
ship. He never had a business engagement which 
interfered with the church-service hour. He planned 
His days with reference to the Moon. This country 
is named after Him. It has been declared a Chris- 
tian country by the highest courts in the land. If 
this means anything, it surely means that His example 
shall be our law — that His birthday and His resurrec- 
tion day shall ever be held in memory among us. 

I am reminded of an incident at sea. There were 
a good many Jews on the ship, and when the time 
came for the Sunday morning service, one Jew was 
heard to remark that he was not going to take his 
children in to hear the story of Christ read. That 
evening a famous tenor sang in the saloon. The Jew 
was in a front seat with his children — and behold, 
the very first song the tenor sang was Tennyson's 
great prophecy of the final triumphant reign of 
Christ : 

" Ring in the valiant man and free, 
The larger heart, the kindlier hand; 
Ring out the darkness of the land, 
Ring in the Christ that is to be." 



VII 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 

"And Benhadad the king of Syria escaped on a horse with 
the horsemen/' — I Kings 20:20. 

HISTORY, like some preachers and other 
folks, is fond of repeating itself. One is 
surprised that it has so little inventive 
genius, that it is so slow to discover new situations. 
Hence, it is a good thing in these days to read over 
again some of the great campaigns of the old Book, 
for we shall discover an amazing similarity to con- 
temporary events. There is no new thing under the 
sun. Whether a man writes a poem, or gets married, 
or commits suicide, somebody else has done it before 
him. Dr. Richards, in his notable sermon on " The 
Monotony of Sin," represents an ancient Babylonian 
being taken through the seamy side of New York 
life, and instead of being charmed, he yawns in weari- 
ness and exclaims to his companion, " Why, we had 
all this in Babylon thousands of years ago." So it 
is that when a man starts out to do an original thing, 
whether it is to build a bridge or an empire, he al- 
ways finds that somebody else has been to the patent 
office before him, and has stolen his secret and copy- 
righted his scheme. Emerson represents Nature as 
saying to an excited little individual, " Why so hot, 
little man ? 99 as much as to say : " Don't lose your 
head and throw your transfer away. The car is still 

107 



108 THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 



on the track. We will run to the end of the line. 
The great Motorman is still in charge. The con- 
ductor hasn't gone to the insane asylum yet. Just 
possess your soul in peace." 

I have made these general observations by way of 
introduction to a very interesting comparison to 
which I wish to call your attention this morning. As 
you take up the twentieth chapter of I Kings, and 
read it through verse by verse, you pause time and 
again to note on the margin the modern equivalent of 
the ancient fact. If you employ the method of the 
deadly parallel, you feel like shaking your finger at 
History and saying : " Look here, History, you have 
been copying. I can show you every detail in an old 
book I have. Next time, try to be more original. 
Give us something new." So I shall attempt to por- 
tray this comparison under a series of headings as we 
study the chapter in detail. 

/. The First Thing I Notice is the Grasping Na- 
ture of Autocracy. 

The more I study history, the less love I think Al- 
mighty God has for kings. As I read of Benhadad 
escaping on a common horse, and Napoleon carried 
away to Elba, and Nicolas Romanoff carried off into 
exile and finally shot, and William Hohenzollern 
shifting from auto to train and from train to auto to 
escape the vengeance of an outraged people, — the 
more I believe in the diminuendo of autocracy ; for it 
seems to be a characteristic of all autocracy to reverse 
the divinely appointed currents of life, and to live for 
self instead of others. Let me illustrate this proposi- 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 109 

tion by tracing for a moment the rise of the Hebrew 
state. 

When the Israelites came into Canaan, they 
brought with them the tribal system which had pre- 
vailed in the desert. But the trouble with this system 
was tkat the tribes were hostile one to another, and 
there was no concerted action against the Canaanite. 
At the utmost, two or three tribes would combine 
temporarily for a common aim, and then fall apart 
again. Hence, you find that in the time of the 
Judges the conquest of the promised land was still 
incomplete. These Judges were thirteen humble 
tribesmen whom the Lord raised up from time to time 
to represent Him in the nation, and so they were both 
patriots and religious reformers. The sixth of the 
Judges, Gideon, was offered the throne by his army 
after his victory over the Midianites, but he declined 
the dignity, saying that God should rule over them. 
The thing which finally forced the Jews to unite was 
their conquest by the Philistines. These Philistines 
had a genius for organization, and with their compact 
federation of five cities were more than a match for 
the disorganized Hebrews, and utterly defeated them 
in the battle of Ebenezer. Then comes the Prophet 
Samuel to the rescue. He came forward as a leader 
in whom the people trusted after the fatal battle of 
Ebenezer, with the vision of deliverance from the 
Philistine yoke through the union of the jealous tribes 
under the rule of a king. The selection of this leader 
was left to Samuel, and he by divine direction chose 
Saul the son of Kish. The effect was magical. The 
leader had appeared, and all the Northern tribes ral- 



110 THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 



lied to his standard. The Amorites were beaten, and 
Saul was chosen king by acclamation. 

Thus began the monarchy in Israel. Now notice : 
While it freed the people from oppression from with- 
out, it brought the new peril of oppression from 
within. The new peril was the abuse of autocratic 
power. You see the Hebrews had been a democratic 
people, and the first kings were slow in exercising 
authority. Saul had little more power than one of 
the Judges. The earliest kings had to make a cove- 
nant with the elders of the tribes before they ascended 
the throne. Prophets could rebuke the king without 
fear of violence. But little by little the spirit of au- 
tocracy began to manifest itself. Saul, for example, 
created a standing army of picked men from all the 
tribes in place of the old tribal militia. Read i Sam- 
uel 14 : 52 : " When Saul saw any strong man or any 
valiant man, he took him unto himself." David went 
further, and added foreign mercenaries to this stand- 
ing army. In the time of Amos, the towns had to 
raise a levy of soldiers in proportion to their popula- 
tion. The elders of the tribes gradually disappeared, 
and in their place there grew up a body of princes, of 
whom we read so frequently in the Old Testament. 
These princes were simply* a bureaucracy of favourites 
appointed by the king. Thus you see that little by 
little the kingship of the Jews began to assume the 
character of an Oriental despotism. 

Does not this all sound very modern? Did you 
ever suppose that the rise of the Hebrew state was so 
similar to the rise of modern states ? There are five 
ways in which the abuse of autocracy always mani- 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 111 



fests itself, and these appear in the Good Book just 
as they do in the Blue Book or the Yellow Book of 
the twentieth century. Here they are : The love of 
magnificence, monopolies of trade, oppressive taxa- 
tion, deeds of violence, and a lust for foreign con- 
quest. The last of these five is the point of compari- 
son now. I suppose there never was an organization 
founded for defense, but was later used for offense. 
Samuel would have turned over in his grave if he 
could have seen what was to come after him. He 
wanted to unite the tribes to beat off the foe ; but here 
we find that as soon as David threw off the Philistine 
yoke, he undertook aggressive campaigns against the 
Moabites, Edomites, Ammonites, and others. This 
is a fact that seems to go with autocracy everywhere. 
It is never satisfied with its place in the sun. It al- 
ways wants to own its neighbour's vine and fig-tree. 
So we find it here in this twentieth chapter of i Kings. 

Look at the historical situation for a moment. I 
remember hearing Elbert Hubbard say: "It is not 
true that competition is the life of trade. Coopera- 
tion is the life of trade." This is true of nations as 
well. Now, if Benhadad and his thirty-two allies had 
been as sharp as they should have been, they would 
have known that it was a suicidal policy to attack 
Israel; for Assyria was menacing them all on the 
north, and instead of fighting the Jews they should 
have formed a League of Nations, a great alliance 
against the Assyrian power. The prophets saw this 
and told the kings so, but the kings contemptuously 
said : " You can't expect a lot of preachers to know 
anything about politics. Let them go on back to their 



112 THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 



prayer-meetings. Forward, march ! " And so they 
went ahead on their blind scheme. Benhadad, like 
some other monarchs, wasn't satisfied to let well 
enough alone. He invaded his neighbour's territory, 
and thus signed the declaration of war, and hostilities 
began. Ahab knew he could not meet the vast army 
in the field, and so he shut himself up in Samaria, and 
the siege commenced. In precisely the same spirit, 
William II declared war on an unprepared world on 
August I, 1914, and the siege of four and a quarter 
years began. 

77. / Notice in the Second Place the Courage of 
the Coward. 

I have always wondered what Dr. Aked's sermon 
on this theme was about. I have never read it, but I 
have read an illustration of that very thing in the 
case of Ahab. Now Ahab was a man whose wife 
was of the masculine gender, and he was of the 
feminine gender. You have to remember that in 
parsing Ahab: proper noun, third person, feminine 
gender, and very singular number. He was an odd 
number, because being a man myself, I decline to 
believe he is one of us. Mrs. Ahab was Mrs. Pank- 
hurst and the whole woman suffrage movement rolled 
into one personality. Mrs. Ahab had converted her 
husband to unchristian science: he became a Baal- 
worshipper ; and of course when a man turns his back 
on God, he doesn't have much to rely on in case of a 
siege or anything else. The other evening as I lay 
awake in the small hours of the night, all alone in the 
big house in which I live, I thought how little was 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 113 



between me and the outside world : in one vulnerable 
place, nothing but two little screw-eyes through which 
a padlock had been passed. But a second thought 
came, and that was : " No, there is the padlock, plus 
the hand of God; there is more between me and the 
world than I know/' It is that infinite Plus that pro- 
tects God's children. But Ahab had no Plus. He 
had nothing but the walls of Samaria, and they were 
very weak. 

Hear the words of the ultimatum. Up to the 
locked gate of the city a herald came to demand ad- 
mission for the ambassadors of Benhadad. Their 
ultimatum was given in words of deepest insult. The 
Syrian demanded everything. When an Oriental 
king had to give to his conqueror all the women of 
his seraglio, even his own queen, he certainly was 
humbled in the dust. Belgium was summoned to do 
practically the same thing, but she refused to do it, 
and the world cheers Albert of Belgium as much as 
it abhors Ahab ; for Ahab said : " At your service, 
Benhadad ; all that I have is thine." 

Will you notice here in passing that our false Baals 
never save us ? Look at this pitiable woman, Jezebel. 
Why, her father was a priest of Astarte, and she had 
built a temple to Baal, and had given an endowment 
which supported 850 priests of Baal, and they with 
all their pompous ceremonies and blood-stained invo- 
cations had wholly failed to save her. And I can 
fancy that she and her husband had a little prayer- 
meeting in the palace after the ambassador of Assyria 
went away, and the refrain of their prayers might 
have been, " O Baal, hear us ! O Baal, save us ! De- 



114 THE TWILIGHT OP THE KINGS 



liver us from the terms of a humiliating peace/' So 
the " good old German God " on whom our enemies 
relied was merely a Baal of their own manufacture, 
and they learned too late that Baal never saves. 

But hark! Here comes a second Lusitania note. 
Another embassy comes from Benhadad, w r hich posts 
a notice of warning saying that to-morrow (twenty- 
four hours' notice) the town will be given up to pil- 
lage. Here the coward king rises to the occasion 
with the courage of despair. He becomes suddenly 
very democratic in the time of reverses. We get an 
interesting bit of information here about the consti- 
tution of the Kingdom of Israel. It was very much 
like that of the little Greek states in the days of the 
Iliad. In prosperity the king was nearly despotic, 
but when things went against him he was reduced to 
the necessity of calling an open-air senate, composed 
of his elders and attended by the people as well. The 
king laid the desperate situation before this council, 
just as the pastor often lays a difficulty before his 
elders, for the benefit of their advice. They rein- 
force Ahab's backbone, stiffening it up, and send back 
a curt refusal of the foreigner's request. So the 
second scene of the drama ends. 

///. The Third Thing I Notice is Pre-Christian 
Diplomacy. 

I do not know how far back the science of Dip- 
lomacy goes. I suppose the custom of interchanging 
notes and messages between nations is as ancient as 
the human race itself. But these notes have not al- 
ways meant just what they have said, and so Diplo- 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 115 



macy has come to mean a roundabout, tactful way of 
stating a matter, which may have to be discounted 
before it can be exchanged into direct cash value. It 
ought to have been true that the coming of Jesus 
Christ and His teachings made an epoch in the 
science of Diplomacy, and Christian Diplomacy ought 
to stand for directness and fair dealing. It waited 
for the Great War, however, to bring this about. 
There is an outstanding example of it, nevertheless, a 
few years back, which anticipated the present hour. 
In 1899, when China was in the midst of the agonies 
pending the Boxer Rebellion, the nations of Europe 
stood looking on with eager eyes, hoping for its dis- 
memberment, that they might each secure a slice. 
Our great John Hay, you remember, addressed to 
those eager observers his famous note of September 
9, 1899, in which he stated that the United States 
stood for fair play in China, and called on any other 
nation which did not agree with this to say so, or 
stand committed to the same policy. The nations 
stood dumbfounded, and wondered what trick was 
behind the words. No nation had the courage to 
stand up and admit it was a thief, and so Hay closed 
the matter with another note, in which he accepted 
their silent acquiescence as "final and definite." 
They spoke of this in Europe as " shirt-sleeve dip- 
lomacy." I like the term. It sounds like directness, 
and the open covenants for which President Wilson 
pleads to-day. 

Notice, then, an early illustration of " shirt-sleeve 
diplomacy " in these pre-Christian days of Ahab and 
Benhadad. There was an exchange of just two notes 



116 THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 



— one each; and as Billy Sunday says, you did not 
have to lug a dictionary along to understand what the 
two kings meant. Benhadad's note was this : " The 
gods do so to me, and more also, if the dust of Sa- 
maria shall suffice for handf uls for all the people that 
follow me." In other words : " I will bring with me 
such an army that after your city is shattered into 
dust, there won't be a handful for each of my sol- 
diers." Do you know what that reminds me of? It 
reminds me of a certain haughty brute who said to 
Mr. Gerard, " I will not stand any nonsense from 
America after this war." Well, we didn't ask him to 
stand any. These two scenes together suggest to me 
a certain verse of a good old Book I sometimes read ; 
" Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit 
before a fall." And any time you want an illustra- 
tion of that Scripture text, get the picture of that 
braggart of Berlin who would not stand any non- 
sense, fleeing for his life from the taunts of a cursing 
world. 

Let us notice Ahab's reply. He simply said : " Do 
you remember, Benhadad, a little proverb which runs 
something like this ? f Let not him that girdeth on his 
harness boast himself as he that putteth it off/ " In 
other words, as the English has it, " Praise a fair day 
at night." Or, as the Latin puts it, " Don't sing the 
triumph song until you win the victory." Or, as the 
French say it, " Don't sell the bear skin before you 
kill the bear." Once again, as the wise old Book puts 
it : " Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou know- 
est not what a day may bring forth." We have the 
same idea in mind when we say, " Man proposes, but 



THE TWILIGHT OP THE KINGS 117 



God disposes." Oh, my hearers, what a world of 
difference there is between the man who exclaims in 
boastful pride, " I am going to do so and so," and 
the other who humbly says, " If the Lord will, my 
plans are such and such." The men who built the 
Tower of Babel left God out. The king who was 
going to grind Samaria to the dust left God out. The 
Emperor from Corsica who was going to rule the 
world left God out. And finally, the man who 
mapped the Berlin to Bagdad railway left God out. 
Beware of any scheme which side-tracks the Almighty 
and rushes ahead on its own steam to the lands be- 
yond. There will be a head-on collision with Failure 
soon or late. The disaster may be a few days or four 
years up the track, but in any case it is there. 

IV. The Fourth Point of Interest is the Interven- 
tion of the Commander-in-Chief. 

One of the great leaders of the late war said, " Bat- 
tles are won by moral forces." I think it was Napo- 
leon who said, " It is the incalculable element which 
wins or loses a battle." So at Waterloo, there was 
just a little declivity in the ground which the French 
engineers had overlooked. So when all is said and 
done, when we have picked our men, and mapped our 
ground, and assigned each general to his place, there 
is still the element of " chance," some call it, but we 
prefer the word " God." God Almighty, my friends, 
is not confined to cathedrals or cloisters, Believe me, 
God was just as hard at work at the first and second 
Marne, and at Verdun and Metz, as the busiest sol- 
diers there. But because the enemy could not see 



118 THE TWILIGHT OP THE KINGS 



Him, they discounted Him. A captive German sol- 
dier displayed a medal sent out from the German 
high command, which had certain insignia on it, and 
then these words : " You will not have to give an ac- 
count in the Day of Judgment for anything you do in 
the service of your country/' These blasphemous 
and impious authorities actually set themselves in the 
place of God, and presumed to grant absolution from 
their blood-stained hands for all wrong done for the 
sake of the Fatherland. "Be not deceived; God is 
not mocked ; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 
also reap." " Vengeance is mine ; I will repay, saith 
the Lord." 

To return to our story, God stepped into the breach. 
I know Ahab trembled when the 'phone rang and 
Central said : " There's a long-distance message for 
you; a prophet of the Lord wants to speak to you." 
Now, here is something very beautiful, my friends; 
let us get it : a touching glimpse into the Father heart 
of our forgiving God. Ahab had no reason to expect 
anything from a God he had discarded long since, and 
so I fancy he looked for a message of hate. But, in- 
stead, here at the eleventh hour, with only a few more 
hours of grace before the assault began, God sends 
this word : " Hast thou seen all this great multitude ? 
I will deliver it into thine hand this day, and thou 
shalt know that I am the Lord." Ah, my friends, I 
believe that one of those days when " Christ's gray 
General," Ferdinand Foch, knelt in humble prayer in 
some little church in northern France, this same 
heartening word came to him : " Seest thou this ter- 
rible enemy? Be of good cheer. Lo, I am with you 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 119 



always, and they shall not pass. They might get by 
you, Foch, but they shall never get by Me. They 
shall not pass." 

I say, thank God for that nameless preacher. We 
do not know who the prophet was. The Rabbis al- 
ways guess at a name when they can, and they say it 
was Micaiah. We care not. The interesting thing 
is, that nothing will so preserve a people's morale as 
confidence in a Supreme Being who watches while 
they sleep, and fights while they are weary, and 
guards them through the night. And so I believe 
that when the history of the recent years is written 
up, that among the agencies which will be counted as 
helping to win the victory, some little place will be 
given to the prophets of God, who stood at their post, 
and tried to keep up the courage of their people by 
saying : " Have faith in God. Do your best, and 
leave it to Him." 

But God always works through means, and the 
very first question which leaps to Ahab's lips is, " By 
whom ? " " You say, God is pledged to win this vic- 
tory. Very well, where are the soldiers to do it? 
We cannot fold our hands and leave it all to Him." 
The answer is, even as it was in America : " By the 
young men." We are not told what the draft age 
was, but we know that the young servants of the 
provincial governors came to the rescue in place of 
the old veterans who had no faith in such a foolish 
venture. 

V. This Brings Us to the Battle Itself. 

God is a wonderful mathematician. He figures up 



120 THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 



His assets and His liabilities, and time and again His 
men have gone into battle when there was not a 
chance in the world for them, except as He stood at 
the weakest place. 

" He turns the arrow that else might harm, 
And out of the storm He brings a calm ; 
And the work that seems so hard to do, 
He makes it easy, for He works too." 

Look at the assets and liabilities here. Look at the 
Central Powers vs. the Allies. The Syrians had 
130,000 men, directed by thirty-five kings, equipped 
with catapults and battering rams, scaling ladders and 
archers, such as we have seen pictures of in the sculp- 
tures of Sennacherib's time. Very well: how many 
did the Allies of God have? There were 232 pages, 
(young men who waited on the district governors) in 
the van, and a paltry army of 7,000 soldiers who 
marched out of the gate of Samaria to the desperate 
undertaking. 

Ahab's plan of campaign was well thought out. 
They left the city at noon. At that burning hour, 
under the intolerable heat of the Syrian sun, it is al- 
most impossible to bear the weight of armour, or to 
sit on horseback, or to endure the fierce heat of iron 
chariots. The Syrian soldiers would be taking their 
noonday siesta, and their chariots and war-steeds 
would be unprepared. Benhadad and his kings were 
in the midst of a drunken revel, when the lookout an- 
nounced that there were some men who had come out 
of the city gates. They were not a respectable 
enough number to call it an army, and the idea of 
an attack by that handful seemed ridiculous. Simi- 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 121 



larlv, there was a time when the American boys were 
laughed at, but somehow that has passed. And so 
the drunken king's command was, " Take them alive, 
whether they come to fight or ask terms of peace." 

Here is a sermon on Preparedness. The Syrians 
were not ready for an attack. The little band dashed 
into the midst of the drunken, sleepy crowd. One 
explanation of Waterloo is, that Napoleon was over- 
come by exhaustion and loss of sleep, and gave con- 
trary orders without knowing it. The Syrian kings 
probably did that also, and one of those fearful panics 
was created which have often been the destruction of 
Eastern hosts. A United States officer told me that 
his experience was, German soldiers were all right 
so long as their commanders were with them. But 
when the battle lines became broken and the officers 
lost, the men had no initiative of their own. The 
same thing was true here, and those who are prone to 
doubt this story will only need to read a little into 
Oriental history to see that the Oriental loses his head 
in a panic, and that scores of battles have been lost 
for that very reason. And so the panic became a 
rout, and the Israelites had nothing to do but to slay, 
and long before evening they were masters of the 
field. 

And now comes the text : " And Benhadad, the 
king of Syria, escaped on an horse with the horse- 
men." The king had a very narrow escape. He 
could not even wait for his chariot. He had to fly 
with a few of his cavalry, and apparently escaped on 
an inferior horse. This is the plight of a man who a 
few hours before had said he would crush Samaria 



122 THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 



into fragments. Does it remind you of anything in 
recent days? Does that fleeing monarch, spurring 
his horse on into the dusk of that Syrian day, have 
any resemblance to a certain European, dashing with 
a handful of followers in a closed automobile out of 
his own city over the border, to be interned as a 
public nuisance in a castle, where he could await the 
sentence of outraged law? 

President Nicholas Murray Butler told the stu- 
dents of Columbia University that the most signifi- 
cant statement he had heard the summer the war 
broke out in Europe, was made to him on the third 
day of August by a German railway servant, a vet- 
eran of the Franco-Prussian War. Dr. Butler asked 
him whether he would have to go to the front. The 
old man said : " No, I am too old. I am seventy-two. 
But my four sons went yesterday — God help them. 
And I hate to have them go; for, sir," he added in 
a lower voice, " this is not a people's war; it is a 
kings' war, and when it is over there may not be so 
many kings." It rather looks as though the old vet- 
eran was a pretty good prophet, does it not ? Emer- 
son's words come back to us with new meaning 
these days : 

" God said, * I am tired of kings, 
I suffer them no more; 
Up to my ears each morning brings 
The outrage of the poor/ " 

VI. Finally, We Come to the Question: After 
Victory, What? 

Many people talked as though the Millennium 
would come as soon as the Allies won the war. Most 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 123 



of us knew better than that. Every peace yet made 
in the world's history has had in it the seed of future 
wars, and if this peace is to be an exception it has 
got to be a new kind of peace. How suggestive is 
the warning which comes to the victorious king in the 
story before us! The same unnamed prophet who 
encouraged him in the darkest hour now warns him 
in the brightest hour. The same preacher who stead- 
ied him in defeat now steadies him in victory. He 
says in substance : " Now be careful, Ahab. Don't 
lose your head. All is not won yet. The Assyrians 
will surely return next year. Look well to your mar- 
gin and reserves. Begin now to prepare yourself for 
the coming conflict." While we do not need to say 
the same thing to the State, it is well for the Church 
to perform the same duty as the ancient prophet ; viz., 
to steady the State in its hour of victory, for we all 
know the perils of reaction. Success is a very hard 
thing to stand. I remember often hearing my father 
say: "Dick is just like most Christians: he can't 
stand prosperity. ,, Dick was my father's high- 
blooded horse, and when he would be allowed to rest 
up a few days he would become so high and mighty 
that it was hard to hold him to the earth, and my 
father would say : " Dick is like most Christians : he 
can't stand prosperity." It remains for us to show 
the world that by God's grace we can win and yet be 
gentlemen. 

The Church must insist on our being more than 
conquerors. Three alternatives once lay before us: 
Defeat, Victory, Super- Victory. The first was im- 
possible, for defeat was not to be our portion. Well, 



124 THE TWILIGHT OF THE KINGS 



what about the second ? Shall we be satisfied with a 
mere victory on the field of battle ? No, we must in- 
sist on nothing less than the third — super-victory. 
Americans can be conquerors, but it takes Christians 
to be more than conquerors. The difference between 
the State and the Church is this : The State wins a 
war when it administers a military defeat. The 
Church of Christ never wins until it has changed the 
heart and mind of the enemy. We have done the first 
thing. We have arrested the prisoner. Now let us 
reform him if possible. 
The Church of God can, in the words of Tennyson : 

" Cling to faith beyond the forms of faith — 
She reels not in the storm of warring worlds, 
She brightens at the clash of Yes and No, 
She sees the best that glimmers through the worst, 
She feels the sun is hid but for a night, 
She spies the summer through the winter bud, 
She finds the fountain where they wailed ' Mirage ! ' n 



VIII 



THE WAY OF CAIN 

* Woe unto them! For they have gone in the way of 
Cain"— J urn II. 

CAIN is an interesting character to me. He 
was the pioneer of the race, for while his 
father and mother were created, he was born. 
He lived in those raw days when men wore skins and 
lived the simple life. He knew nothing of the refine- 
ments and the restraints of modern civilization; but 
he lived out in the open like the beasts of the field, 
and when he became angry he shed blood, without 
any idea of the preciousness of a human life. Polite 
society meant nothing to him, and police were an un- 
known race. Rude citizen of the early days that he 
was, he has his lessons for the twentieth century man. 

I wonder how that first father and mother watched 
the unfolding of the little life, which must have meant 
so much to them. I wonder if they never dreamed 
as they watched the tiny fingers that those hands 
would be laid in bloodshed on his brother's head. I 
wonder if they saw destiny written on his brow and 
dreamed dreams of empire for their babe. We can- 
not tell, but we know that the eternal fascination and 
mystery of childhood must have held them spellbound 
as they watched the bud of promise open into the 
flower of fulfillment. 

Well, the story tells us that in process of time, 

125 



126 THE WAT OF CAIN 



Cain ceased to have things all his own way, for a 
brother was born ; and Cain began to learn that some- 
body else had some rights which he must respect. I 
do not know how long he was an only child, but I 
can't help imagining that this youngster was spoiled 
and that he had begun to imagine that the sun and 
moon and stars were built for his benefit. You know 
when that state of affairs comes to pass, somebody 
must learn a lesson — and Cain learnt his with a bitter 
experience. 

Picture the two brothers, the one at work in his 
field and the other tending his sheep. Imagine a rude 
altar somewhere in the vicinity of the house, and 
watch the two men as they come to make their offer- 
ings. Cain brings some of his fruit, giving what he 
had; and Abel brought the firstlings of his flock. It 
looks as though the Almighty would have been con- 
tent with this, since each man gave of what he had, — 
but look again. God turns away from the fruit with 
disapproval but accepts the burnt offering of the 
cattle-dealer. The farmer Cain is not used to such 
treatment as this — and he proposes to show his 
brother that his feelings cannot be hurt with impunity. 

One thing that appeals to me about that early civili- 
zation is that men were honest. In modern life we 
cloak our feelings and smother our aches to such an 
extent that it becomes difficult to find the grain be- 
neath the varnish. Oh, for less varnish and more 
plain reality ! Cain showed his hurt plainly and God 
talked with him about it, but he still nursed his grudge 
and waited for his chance. Abel presumably did not 
go armed to his sheepfold, for his sheep were tracta- 



THE WAY OF CAIN 127 



able and he had no enemies. But one day he saw his 
brother approaching with evil in his eye — and after a 
few hot words, he felt the sting of a brother's anger 
and the blow of a brother's murderous hand. His 
hot blood fell upon the ground and he soon lay cold 
in death. The first murder was over. 

It is not necessary to trace in detail the rest of the 
story at this point. I have simply tried to put before 
you the tragic case of the first two brothers, in order 
that we may follow intelligently the way of Cain, as 
he falls out with his brother and his God and ulti- 
mately his own soul. Looking down the roadway, 
we discover four outstanding mile-posts in the way 
that he followed, and these shall be our halting-places 
for a few moments to-day. 

/. The Way of Heresy. 

Cain was the first heretic. All heresy trials go 
back to him. All the long role of unbelievers and 
non-conformists and free-thinkers ought to honour 
him as their patron saint. It has been a sorry his- 
tory, this story of men who couldn't accept God's 
way, but insisted that their own was better. 

Now, what was the heresy of Cain? I admit that, 
as you look casually at the narrative, and see that 
each of the men brings his offering out of what he 
had (Cain bringing fruit, because he was a farmer, 
and Abel bringing an animal because he was a herds- 
man) it looks as though the Almighty were partial in 
accepting the one and rejecting the other. But the 
Judge of all the earth can be trusted to do right, and 
the longer we look, the more do we see that there 



128 THE WAY OF CAIN 



must be an underlying justice in this apparent caprice. 
Again, I ask therefore, what was the heresy of Cain ? 
Let us see : 

If we turn to the great honour-roll of faith heroes 
in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, we find Abel 
mentioned as the first hero of faith in the Bible and 
we read : " By faith Abel offered unto God a more 
excellent sacrifice than Cain. ,, Now what is faith? 
Faith is, in its simplest analysis, taking God at His 
word. Accordingly, we infer that there must have 
been a previous instruction to Adam and his sons, 
that they must approach God through sacrifice, 
through the price of blood. And so you observe that 
when God rebukes Cain and makes a last plea to him 
He shows him plainly that there is a way which is 
pleasing to Him. " Why is thy countenance fallen ? 
If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And 
if thou doest not well, a sin-offering croucheth down 
at the tent-door." Take the old translation, if you 
will : " sin lieth at the door." God wants to show 
Cain that the thing which separates between Him and 
man is sin — and that the acceptable sacrifice is a liv- 
ing atonement for sin. 

We are prepared now to answer our question: 
Cain had no adequate sense of sin in his religion. 
His theology had not a stain of blood in it. There 
was no awful curse and no crying need of forgive- 
ness. Sin was a word which had no place in his vo- 
cabulary—perhaps he thought it vulgar. Of course, 
he made mistakes and he was conscious of something 
wrong now and then, but he had no feeling of the 
justice of a holy God. He expected to be saved by 



THE WAT OF CAIN 129 



the work of his own hands and so these fruits which 
he had cultivated must be his saviours, if any were 
needed. 

My brethren, there are a good many Cainites to- 
day, although we do not call them such. They never 
have a Cross on their church. They never mention 
the exceeding sinfulness of sin. They never sing that 
hymn : " Dear, dying Lamb, Thy precious blood shall 
never lose its power/' They never have a mourners' 
bench where men cry for forgiveness, and they never 
build a city mission where tramps and bums can find 
a Saviour who makes them all over again new. No, 
they rather agree with ex-President Eliot and they 
adopt his new religion. But it is humorous to call 
that twentieth century suggestion a new religion, be- 
cause it goes all the way back to Cain — and that is a 
good ways back. 

I have been reading recently some of the literature 
of the Reformation time; and one is impressed with 
the awful sense of sin which those men had. It is 
quite refreshing to turn from the placidity of the 
twentieth century to the agony of the sixteenth, — and 
while, of course, the idea of penance and punishment 
may be carried to unwarranted extremes, yet one 
wonders as between liberalism and fanaticism, if the 
former may not be more dangerous than the latter. 
When Martin Luther lay on his bed of sickness, a 
monk repeated the creed by his bedside ; and when he 
came to the phrase " I believe in the forgiveness of 
sins," there sprang up in the heart of the future re- 
former the light which led him on his way through 
the stormy days ahead. So with Myconius, another 



130 THE WAY OP CAIN 



of the reformers, who said to his son, " The blooci of 
Christ is the only ransom for the sins of the world. 
O my son, though three men only should be saved by 
Christ's blood, believe that thou art one of those 
three." And so, I believe that another great revival 
or reformation would sweep the Church, brethren, if 
we could get men to crying to God for mercy and for 
deliverance from their sins. But of course, if there 
is nothing to be saved from, there is no need of a Sa- 
viour. And if there is no need of a Saviour, there is 
no use in joining a church which is named after His 
name. 

//. The Way of Murder. 

Cain was the first murderer. All assassins and 
traitors and lynchers who have taken the law into 
their own hands, look up to him as their patron saint. 
He first taught men to let their passions get the better 
of judgment and to let anger have its way. Every 
anarchist and every lawless mob is but following 
blindly in the way of Cain. Even the pages of Bible 
history are strewn with his successors in the fine art 
of murder; — there are at least thirty instances reach- 
ing all the way from Eden to Christ and from Cain to 
Barabbas. Lamech, Moses, Joab, Solomon, David, 
Absalom, Zimri — these are among the names of the 
men in the catalogue of crime; and the comment 
which the writer makes in the case of Zimri might 
well be made in every case : " Had Zimri peace who 
slew his master?" Had Cain peace, who slew his 
brother ? 

Have you ever read the Legend of Jubal? It is 



THE WAY OF CAIN 131 



perhaps George Eliot's most praiseworthy poem. It 
represents Cain as running far away from men in 
order that his sons may never know what death is. 
One day, one of Lamech's sons is killed — and his 
brethren gather around him in silent wonderment — it 
is the first time they have ever seen death — they can- 
not understand it ; it must have been an awful revela- 
tion to man to discover that the human body could 
become cold and lifeless. Cain, alas, knows only too 
well what this strange pallor means ; he had seen it in 
the case of his murdered brother, and had wished 
to hide it from his sons, but murder and death will 
always out. And so he pushes his way through the 
wondering throng and exclaims : 

" He will not wake. This is the endless sleep, and we 
must make 

A bed deep down for him beneath the sod." 
Then the writer goes on to add : 

" No budding branch, no pebble from the brook, 
No form, no shadow, but new dearness took 
From the one thought that life must have an end." 

Death is an awful thing, and yet Metchnikoff has 
argued that when men have lived their time out, there 
comes an appetite for death just as natural as are all 
of the other human appetites. And perhaps it is 
natural for the human spirit to desire rest and peace 
at home after a long pilgrimage through this world. 
But the awful thing about murder is that it sends a 
soul prematurely to the bar of God. The Almighty 
may have had much more earthly work for that man 



132 THE WAY OF CAIN 



to do — and here, His plan is rudely interrupted and 

His divine calculations brought to nought by the hand 
of anger. No wonder that every code of law on 
earth punishes with heavy penalties the man who 
takes another's life. 

Let us notice here that crime goes further back 
than does law. At the time when this dastardly deed 
was committed there were no laws against murder. 
The ten commandments were not given until long 
after this, and even the law of Genesis 9 : 6, of eye for 
eye and tooth for tooth, had not yet been given. 
What shall God do with this man? He inflicts a 
curse upon him and puts a mark upon his body. The 
tragedy of Cain was that he didn't recognize the pre- 
ciousness of human life — he didn't know what infinite 
patience and care it took to bring a life into being — 
he didn't know what a soul meant to God. 

I raise the question whether we have yet learned, 
after all these years, the sanctity of life. Some years 
ago one of our magazines had an article with the 
headline, " Lives at $75." It referred to the fact 
that three years after the Triangle fire in New York, 
in which one hundred and forty-eight lives were sac- 
rificed to greed, the families of twenty-three of the 
victims, wearied in their long fight for justice, agreed 
to accept $75 as the price of the life of their child. 
Talk about blood-money— have we come to that? 
Are we selling our lives at $75 apiece in America? 
If so, it is time for the slave-dealer to move in. 
Every ten minutes of the day or night, five workmen 
will be killed or seriously injured in the one State of 
New York alone. Every minute, taking the country 



THE WAY OF CAIN 



133 



as a whole, some one American dies from a prevent- 
able cause. Every five years we kill as many in our 
industries as were killed in the Union Army at Get- 
tysburg. Brethren, we are following in the wake of 
Cain — and we shall inherit his curse. The Lord 
bless every effort, both of industry and society, which 
aims to set a higher par value on a human life. Life 
is all too cheap at best, but in the vision of God, man 
is of infinite worth, because Jesus Christ died to save 
him. 

III. The Way of Wandering. 

Cain was the first tramp. All wanderers go back 
to him. Listen to his wail : " My punishment is 
greater than I can bear. I shall be a fugitive and a 
vagabond in the earth and it shall come to pass that 
every one that findeth me shall slay me." "And 
Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and 
dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden." Cain 
is the type of man who tries to run away from an 
unforgiven past. He leaves blood spilt upon the 
ground and doesn't know that his own hands are 
bloody. He has a haunted look in his eyes and 
doesn't know that his whole appearance gives him 
away. "The voice of thy brother's blood crieth 
unto me from the ground." Oh, how true it is — 
and the latest criminologists can't improve upon 
that sentence. Blood has a megaphone voice. Poe 
tells in one of his stories of the hunted criminal who 
had committed murder and had hidden the body of 
his victim under the boards of the floor so neatly that 
the officers of the law didn't discover the place. But 



134 THE WAY OF CAIN 



the murderer imagines that the heart of the dead man 
is beating so loudly that the police can hear it as 
clearly as he can, and so he tears up the floor and 
reveals the crime — and Poe calls it the story of the 
" Telltale Heart." It is one more proof that crime is 
its own detective — the telltale heartbeat, the telltale 
blood, and the telltale look in the eyes of the guilty 
man. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. 

What do you think Cain's mark was ? " The Lord 
set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill 
him." I do not know, but I rather think it was the 
hunted, haunted look in his eyes and his general 
criminal bearing. And when men saw that look, it 
said to them : " Don't touch this man. You needn't 
kill him. You needn't send him to hell, for he is in 
hell already. He is suffering the tortures of a guilty 
conscience — he is suffering from unforgiven blood — 
from unwashed crime. Leave him alone. He has 
agony enough now." Cain is the type of man de- 
scibed by Paul Lawrence Dunbar in the following 
lines : 

" Good-bye," I said to my conscience, 
" Good-bye for aye and aye." 
And I put her hands off harshly 

And turned my face away; 
And conscience, smitten sorely, 

Returned not from that day. 

But a time came when my spirit 

Grew weary of its pace. 
And I cried : " Come back, my conscience, 

I long to see thy face." 
But conscience cried : * I cannot ; 

Remorse sits in my place.* 99 



THE WAY OF CAIN 135 



The Persians have a story to the effect that one day 
the great Persian Sadi found a man in the jungle at- 
tacked by a tiger and horribly mutilated. The dying 
man's features were calm and serene, however. He 
exclaimed : " Great God, I thank Thee that I am suf- 
fering only from the fangs of the tiger and not from 
the fangs of remorse/' And so, sometimes, brethren, 
when I have had people question me as to whether 
I thought hell were merely a place of physical tor- 
ment, I have replied that I thought it was perhaps a 
place of meditation on an unforgiven past. I can 
conceive of nothing worse than that. Hence, as we 
look back in fancy to the vagabond Cain, driven like 
a wandering Jew from place to place, and never find- 
ing peace, we do feel that he spoke truly when he said 
" My punishment is greater than I can bear." 

" I hear a voice you cannot hear 
Which says I must not stay ; 
I see a hand you cannot see 
Which beckons me away." 

And so the self-detected and self-condemned man 
went his way. May God have mercy on all who, like 
him, carry hidden the guilty secrets of some dead past 
which only infinite Love can forgive and graciously 
heal! 

IV. The Way of Godless Civilization. 

Cain was the first city-builder, and all promoters 
and colonizers look back to him as their prototype.^ 
You will observe that God's original plan for man 
was a garden — the open air and the flowers and the 



136 THE WAT OF CAI2* 



birds and the sunshine — and it is in the garden that 
the Lord walks in the cool of the day. But now that 
Cain has turned his back on Jehovah, he flees to the 
protection of city life, and so the first city was built 
by a murderer whose hands were red with the blood 
of his brother. Perhaps that is one reason why the 
city has always been overwhelmed with trying prob- 
lems — because the initial city was a protest against 
God's plan. 

Now you notice that civilization begins in the line 
of Cain, and you have Jabal as the father of cattle- 
raisers ; and there is Jubal who was the original harp- 
ist and organist; and there is Tubal-Cain who was 
an instructor in brass and iron. You see we have 
both city and country life, and both artists and manu- 
facturers. Here we catch the first faint beginnings 
of that civilization which built its monuments in 
Egypt and its poems in Greece and its statesmanship 
in Rome, and its greatest triumphs in modern Europe 
and America. And yet, with the open page of history 
before us, can we see that civilization of itself has 
ever been a saving power ? 

What does anybody think of when the expression 
" Modern Civilization " is mentioned? Well, most of 
us think at once of automobiles and telephones and 
electric lights and sky-scrapers and wireless telegraphy 
and ocean liners and submarine boats. What are all 
these things ? Are they not merely advanced methods 
of doing business or increased methods of luxurious 
enjoyment? Is there a single one of them which 
serves the soul — or do they all serve the body? Is 
there one of them which serves God, or do they all 



THE WAY OF CAIN 137 



serve man? Is there one of them which relates to 
the endless future on ahead, or do they all have to do 
with the present life of storm and stress? Ponder 
these and similar questions and we soon shall see that 
there is little in civilization itself which denies its 
father Cain. 

My brethren, what we need to do is to get out of 
the way of Cain if we are in it. Some one will 
quickly answer, " Oh, I'm not a heretic — I'm not in 
the way of Cain," but I ask, " Wait — do you take God 
absolutely at His word? If not, you are tending 
slightly in that direction." Another says, " I'm not a 
murderer — I'm not in the way of Cain." Yes, but 
listen to the higher interpretation of the murderous 
spirit made by Jesus : " Ye have heard that it was 
said, 'Thou shalt not kill' — but I say unto you, * Who- 
soever is angry with his brother without cause shall 
be in danger of the judgment/ " Another says, " I'm 
not a tramp ; I'm not in Cain's company." Yes, but 
are you not perhaps running away from some unfor- 
given sin or are you content with your past? And 
still another says, " I'm not given over to godless civ- 
ilization — for I live in Christian America." But I 
imagine Jesus would reply, " I say unto you, Except 
your righteousness exceed that of the scribes and 
Pharisees ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom 
of heaven." 

And so, beloved, it all comes back to this — what 
way are you on? Watch your mile-stones — do they 
point upward or downward? I am reminded of my 
experience in a certain cross-country drive. We fol- 
lowed the Blue Book and when we came to any fork 



138 THE WAY OF OAIN 



of the roads we would watch very carefully to see if 
the landmarks in the landscape tallied with those 
noted in the book; and if they didn't, then we knew 
we were on the wrong road and we went back to the 
previous fork and started over again in a different 
direction. Watch your landmarks, I say, — and if 
they are any of the things I have mentioned — go back 
to the fork of the road and start out on the path 
marked with God's love and mercy and it will lead 
you home. " The way may lead through darkness, 
but it leads to light at last." 

u Goodness and mercy all my life 
Shall surely follow me; 
And in God's house forevermore 
My dwelling-place shall be." 



IX 



COMPULSORY ATHEISM 



m Ye have taken away my gods which I made, . . . and 
what have I more?" — Judges 18:24. 

yTOU remember the story of the college presi- 



dent who was greeted by a bumptious youth 



JL on the campus one morning with the remark, 
" Professor, I fail to find any satisfactory argument 
for the existence of God." The wise preceptor re- 
marked, "Young man, you must find a God before 
evening or else leave this place." The rebuke was 
well deserved, for this was a case of elective or pref- 
erential atheism, in contrast to that of my text, which 
was compulsory atheism. 

It is a stirring picture which greets us in this 
eighteenth chapter of Judges. A tribe of Danites 
are on a tour of migration from their home down by 
the sea, up to the foothills of Lebanon. There are 
six hundred men, armed to the teeth, besides women 
and children. At the time our story opens the 
caravan had come to the house of Micah, an Ephraim- 
ite, w T here some of the leaders recognize an old friend 
in Micah's young priest. Now, men who go forth to 
steal land do not hesitate to steal gods ; and so one of 
the leaders says to the crowd : " I have a secret. I 
know where we can get some gods which will make 




139 



140 COMPULSOEY ATHEISM 



our company eminently respectable. See yonder 
little chapel? It is fitted up in the most approved 
style. Now I have given you the tip. The rest is 
in your hands." 

Well, I can see the mob in fancy as it swarms into 
the courtyard of the house and stands at a respect- 
ful distance, while the five spies who attended the 
chapel on their first trip go into the little church and 
dismantle the altar and bring out to the mob their 
ready-made gods. For, mark you, if this is to be an 
up-to-date caravan, it must be equipped with images — 
only vulgar crowds are atheistic. But alas for the 
preacher as he sees this wrecking company at work ; 
and so, before they walk off entirely with his re- 
ligious furnishings, he finds his voice and exclaims: 
u Would you gentlemen object to explaining to me 
why you are walking off with my church ? " 

And now notice their tempting reply. They consti- 
tute themselves into a pulpit-committee and promptly 
tender him a call to a larger parish. They say to him 
in substance : " Your field is very limited here. You 
don't want to spend your days as Micah's private 
chaplain, when you might be the pastor of a whole 
tribe of Israelites/* And the young man didn't take 
very long to pray over this call. I judge he thought 
he must either go with his gods or lose his occupa- 
tion, and the call of bread and butter is a very im- 
perative one. "And the priest's heart was glad, and 
he took the images and went into the midst of the 
people/* 

Turn now to what was going on in the house after 
the marauders had departed. Poor Micah very soon 



COMPTJLSOKY ATHEISM 141 



discovered his loss, and raising a company of his 
neighbours, started out to overtake the robbers. 
Some distance down the road he came upon them 
and called to them to halt. They turn as if in great 
surprise and ask, " What aileth thee, that thou comest 
with such a company ? " And his reply is the verse 
which I have chosen for my text : " Ye have taken 
away my gods which I made, and the priest, and ye 
are gone away : And what have I more ? And what 
is this that ye say unto me, ' What aileth thee He 
is advised to restrain his grief for fear some of the 
rougher members of this gentle company may make 
him pay dearly for it. "And when Micah saw that 
they were too strong for him, he turned and went 
back to his home." 

Such is the quaint old story which I have labelled 
" Compulsory Atheism." The man is made godless 
against his will. He had fitted up his little hillside 
chapel with laborious care; he had spared no ex- 
pense on his pantheon of gods, he had secured a regu- 
larly ordained Levite as his chaplain. Surely he had 
a right to expect the favour of heaven. Such a man 
does not want to have his religion stolen suddenly by 
a band of emigrants, even if they do need it more than 
he does. Micah did not have enough religion to ex- 
port; he needed it all for home consumption. But 
what can a man do when six hundred armed robbers 
invite his deities away? He can do nothing but go 
back to an atheism which is all the more pardonable 
because it is involuntary. And so we take leave of 
the Ephraimite whose story we have thus briefly 
resurrected from its dead past. 



142 COMPULSOEY ATHEISM 



"His bones are dust, 
His good sword rust — 
His soul is with the saints we trust." 

What is the modern message from the ancient 
narrative? There are some things of abiding signifi- 
cance in the cry of the injured Micah. All un- 
consciously he traverses three steps in the evolution 
of religion in his exclamation. His gods were manu- 
factured, they were stolen, and they were all he had 
to tie to. " Ye have taken away my gods which I 
made, and what have I more?" Let us call the 
three steps : Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Idealism. We 
survey these in detail 

/. Idolatry: "My Gods Which I Made." 

Idolatry is religion made easy. It is worship while 
you wait. It brings the absentee god near. It is an 
illustration of the unconquerable desire for ob- 
jectivity which is a characteristic of the Oriental and 
Mediterranean peoples. There is undoubtedly a cer- 
tain fascination about seeing God both by eye-gate 
and mind-gate. If the inventive genius of this twen- 
tieth century were to try its hand on improving re- 
ligion, it might get some pointers from Micah ; for it 
is vastly easier to concentrate the distracted mind on 
a thing than a principle. And the most uncompro- 
mising Protestant cannot but feel the appeal of a 
visible emblem of the Unseen. They tell us that He 
is " Closer than breathing, Nearer than hands and 
•feet." Yes, we believe it ; but oh, that we could touch 
Him ! Here comes the blessing of the crucifix or the 
image or the eikon. It is silence breaking into speech, 



COMPULSOEY ATHEISM 143 



it is Spirit breaking into matter, it is God dwelling ip 
wood or marble. It is in a new sense, Immanuel — 
God with us. 

The idol-worshipper stops with second causes — he 
doesn't trace the storm or wind or fire to their real 
Source. He would say that the trolley explains the 
electric-car, because it is the most evident thing about 
the car — and hence you would have a cult of trolley- 
worshippers. Similarly he would attribute the physi- 
cian's skill to some power resident in the knife, and a 
luscious bunch of grapes to the kind grape-god hiding 
in the vine. And so of course the sun and moon and 
stars shine by their own light instead of reflecting the 
smile of God; and thus the idol becomes an arrant 
thief, stealing the worship which belongs to the Power 
behind the throne. But it is a time-saving apparatus ; 
for just as Micah saved himself the trouble of going 
to Jerusalem to worship by having his gods near at 
hand, so the savage saves his mind the trouble of 
the journey into the unseen — the journey that Job 
took, for example, when he cried out, " O that I 
knew where I might find Him." The idolater 
knows — here He is. And so it is a very convenient 
form of religion, could we but accept it. 

Only recently we read of an incident which took 
place in or near Singapore. The natives believe that 
spirits reside in trees, and these Tree-spirits are ap- 
peased by incense-sticks which are placed in or near 
the tree. One evening a rich young Baba, one Lee 
Khia Guan, who had been educated at Cambridge, 
was strolling with a friend; and happening on one 
such tree, he saw a number of joss-sticks burning at 



144 COMPULSOEY ATHEISM 



its roots. He laughed at the crude superstition of the 
natives, kicking the sticks over and trampling upon 
them in glee. His friend remonstrated with him, as 
they resumed their walk, saying that " there might 
be something in it," and that for his part he pre- 
ferred to leave such things severely alone, as he had 
heard of cases where accidents had happened to per- 
sons who interfered with such trees. Guan ridiculed 
the idea of haunted trees as a belief of the ignorant 
coolies. Three days later, while he was on his way 
to town in his motor car, just as he passed under this 
tree, a high branch fell right across the car, killing 
him on the spot and demolishing the entire front part 
of the car. Of course the tree-spirit did it. Here 
you have an example of the rise of idolatry, by the 
transformation of second causes into first cause. 
This is precisely what the Old Testament Semites 
did — they invested each spring or tree or mountain- 
top or cave with a " baal " or proprietor ; and to him 
a high-place was built, and a stone pillar set up and 
a " beth-el," or house of deity, dedicated. 

Would that we might stop there, with the Semites 
and the Malays — but we cannot. Bishop Heber's 
hymn must be rewritten, for the American in his 
blindness bows down to flesh and blood. New York 
alone has a Vedanta Society of 5,000 members. 
Seattle has its Buddhist temple, San Francisco its 
Hindu shrine, Los Angeles its Krishna organiza- 
tion, Chicago and Lowell their Zoroastrian temples, 
and a modern Mohammedan cult has its new church 
in the Illinois metropolis also. The Congress of Re- 
ligions in 1893 is to be thanked in part for the in- 



COMPULSOEY ATHEISM 146 



vasion of America by heathen idols. And so we 
need a few Home Missions to ourselves, as well as 
Foreign Missions to the places where " only man is 
vile." Here woman is vile as well. 

A still more personal question remains before we 
pass from this point. Even those of us who are 
nominally Christian find others beside Christ on our 
altars. The Egyptians had the fiction that the gods 
when pursued by their enemies had to take refuge in 
the body of an animal, and hence their reverence for 
the brute creation. Ah me, the Son of God would 
have to take refuge in a pile of gold or some other 
mundane creation to win the worship of some of His 
followers! It is told of one specially religious Af- 
rican tribe that they fill their huts and hovels with so 
many idols that there is hardly any room left for 
their families. Well, I can think of people closer 
home than Africa, who not only crowd out their 
families with their gods — they even crowd out God 
Himself. Oh, beloved, shame on us in these heathen- 
Christian days. I know it is a hard thing to fling 
from your altars the gods of many years, but may the 
Lord help you to do it! Now is a good time to 
register your vow in the hymn we sing : 

" The dearest idol I have known, 
What e'er that idol be— 
Help me to tear it from Thy throne 
And worship only Thee." 

II. Iconoclasm: " Ye Have Taken Away My 
Gods." 

You will not find this crime on the statute-books 
of the State to-day, and yet there is none more 



146 COMPULSOEY ATHEISM 



heinous. A man may steal my purse and my home 
and even my good name rather than my god. And 
yet there are those who make a business of doing 
just this very thing. There have always been and 
always will be men who have gotten tired of divinities, 
and who cannot find any trace of God through tele- 
scope or scalpel or even in a sunset. Now, if they 
do not want a god for themselves, that is of course 
their business and their loss;— but one would think 
they would let well enough alone and let him have 
gods who would. No, they must needs cleanse the 
world from the defilement of deity. 

One thinks of Tennyson's plea which is still 
needed : 

"O thou that after toil and storm 

Mayst seem to have reached a purer air, 
Whose faith has centre everywhere, 

Nor cares to fix itself in form — 
Leave thou thy sister when she prays, 

Her early heaven, her happy views ; 
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse 

A life that leads melodious days." 

The writer can never forget a personal experience. 
In the seminary days when the youthful theologian 
knew it all, he made a pilgrimage to the old manse, 
where, among others, lived a little sister whose simple 
faith was never disturbed by roving bands of Danites. 
He happened to make some chance remark about the 
original form of the Lord's Prayer. At once the 
little sister's face was clouded and the eager voice 
remarked, "Why, Herbie, isn't the Bible true?" 
The sting of that question will never be erased. 



COMPULSOET ATHEISM 147 



Once and for all the young theologian resigned from 
the ranks of the Danites. He will not be a demol- 
isher of shrines where some repair, whose shoes' 
latchet he is not worthy to unloose ! 

But there are Danites to-day who have not re- 
signed. One might speak of a certain type of science, 
or of a materialistic philosophy, or of Marxian So- 
cialism, which insists that it is the duty of every So- 
cialist to erase the name of God from the universe. 
Or one might think of Schopenhauer or Renan or 
Voltaire or Ingersoll or Knapp or a thousand others ; 
but many of the brave Philistines of the past have 
long since fallen. I like that story of Chaplain Mc- 
Cabe, who read one day as he journeyed on a rail- 
way train, the speech of Robert Ingersoll the night 
before in which he prophesied the speedy decease of 
the Church. The chaplain stopped long enough at 
the next station to send the following telegram to 
Ingersoll : " Dear Robert. All hail the power of 
Jesus' name. We are now building one Methodist 
church a day, and propose to make it two." And so I 
feel like sending a similar wire : " Dear Danites. Fire 
away. Nobody minds you. The Son of God goes 
forth to war. Come and join our happy band." 

An atheist named Lewis Knapp erected a series of 
tablets in the cemetery of Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 
order to perpetuate his peculiar sentiments. He 
worked for years on the composing of the inscrip- 
tions, and when they were completed they made up 
one of the most remarkable arraignments of the 
Christian religion known in history. Men came thou- 
sands of miles to read and copy the words, and it is 



148 COMPULSOKY ATHEISM 



said that when they were sent to a foundry to be cast 
upon monuments of metal which would withstand 
fire as well as the elements, the men working in the 
foundry went on strike because they feared they 
might call down upon them the wrath of the Most 
High. But the infidel spent his money and time for 
nought, for the surviving relatives of Knapp are not 
in sympathy with his atheism, and some years ago 
they signed an agreement that the monuments be 
taken out, broken into small pieces, and the debris 
either buried or thrown into the lake. So perish all 
the King's enemies ! 

There is, however, a type of iconoclasm which is 
decidedly helpful, rather than hurtful. Hezekiah 
was a benefactor to the people when he took hold of 
the brazen serpent which had outlived its day of use- 
fulness and broke it in pieces before the people and 
said : " Quit worshipping that thing — why, it is noth- 
ing but a piece of brass." "And he called it Ne- 
hushtan." I like this idea which some well-meaning 
men are putting forward, of having an illuminated 
cross on the roof of our great sky-scrapers, not to 
protect the man on the fifteenth floor but to point the 
harassed traveller in the street upward to God. And 
I shall favour the plan until God becomes nailed to 
the cross; when that happens, some modern Heze- 
kiah must mount the roof and shatter the cross into 
fragments and call it " Nehushtan." For, as the poet 
reminded us, it is only when the half-gods go that 
the gods arrive. Better a bare altar and God than a 
hundred lighted candles but no Saviour. Victor 
Hugo says that Waterloo was lost because Napoleon 



COMPULSOEY ATHEISM 149 



bothered God; I tell you, when demigods get in the 
way of God, they ought to be overthrown. It be- 
hooves us to remember this, when we find that we are 
loving something better than God. 

But it goes without saying that it's a mighty poor 
god that is capable of being stolen; then it ought to 
be stolen ; there is need of some theological scavengers 
always. Paul was one such: he was fond of show- 
ing that the Old Testament types had been super- 
seded by the New Testament reality. The key-word 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews is " better " — and this 
very word is an example of Pauline iconoclasm. 
Jesus Himself was regarded as an image-breaker by 
His enemies : this Man who would destroy the temple 
and build it again in three days was surely a danger- 
ous citizen and had better be taken to His cross. All 
down through the history of the Church there have 
been braves who have dared to defy custom and blaze 
a new way to the throne of God. Luther shattered 
all precedents when he nailed his theses to the church- 
door; and to-day Billy Sunday offends the sensitive 
when he turns his sledge-hammer invective against 
the modern Church. Let us be patient; for the 
great sin of which the iconoclast is guilty is that of 
being born too soon. The reformer of to-day is 
the conservative of to-morrow; and so it is that we 
build pathways to the graves of the men whom our 
forefathers stoned. 

Idealism: "And What Have I More? " 
Micah's cry has been often repeated in the history 
of religious experience. u Don't take away my images, 



150 COMPULSORY ATHEISM 



for I have nothing beyond them." When our Roman 
Catholic maid entered for the first time a Protestant 
church she cried out in surprise : " But where are the 
pictures?" She could not conceive of worship 
apart from her gods. When the Mohammedan 
prays he must needs face Mecca, for he has nothing 
more in prayer than the physical localization of God 
in a place on the maps. So it is with some of 
our friends of the liturgic churches, who go so far 
as to say that they do not feel they have been to 
service at all unless they have bowed the knee in the 
prescribed form. We are all more or less in bondage 
to the superficial ; and hence we have a fellow-feeling 
with the man who was converted in one of Mr. 
Sunday's meetings out in Iowa. This man came into 
the tabernacle one day after the meeting and spread 
out on the platform a large napkin akin to the table- 
cloth in its size. He said : " I want a lot of shavings 
and sawdust." " What for ? " " I'll tell you : I want 
enough to make a sofa pillow. Right here is where 
I knelt down and was converted. I would like to 
have enough to make a sofa pillow, to have some- 
thing in my home to make me think of God. I don't 
want to forget God, or that I was saved. Can you 
give me enough ? " The evangelist replied : " Yes, 
indeed ; and if you want enough to make a mattress, 
take it ; and if you want enough of the tent to make 
a pair of breeches for each of the boys, take your 
scissors and cut it right out, if it will help you to 
keep your mind on God." 

Now of course, this is all very superficial; as re- 
ligion in its early stages always is. It is only skin- 



COMPULSOEY ATHEISM 151 



deep. It is a kind of pious rash, or a theological 
measles. The man cries out helpless, " What have 
I more? " And if the Danites come along and pro- 
ceed to tear the scaffolding down, he cries as though 
the house were falling in. If the silly oxen shake 
the ark, he puts forth his hand like Uzzah to steady 
it and keep it from falling— and he probably gets 
Uzzah's reward for his pains. 

We are in danger to-day, it seems to me, of living 
on the surface. We exaggerate organization and 
minimize inspiration. We pin our affection to the 
accidental instead of to the real things. We are told 
of a man who wanted to kill himself when the Holy 
Roman Empire fell. We read of a Baltimore woman 
who suicided when a beloved pastor was removed. 
We all know of congregations which have been 
wrecked over the building of a new edifice and the 
discarding of the old. People come to love the holes 
in the wall and the bricks in the building. Have we 
gone very far beyond the heathen, after all, with his 
gods of wood and stone ? " He made as though he 
would have gone farther, but they constrained him, 
and he went in." 

I can suggest an appropriate epitaph for some dead 
churches that I know. I would write over their 
closed doors this superscription : " Killed By Machin- 
ery." We set up so many wheels and belts and 
levers that some day accidentally we become ensnared 
in the red tape ourselves and die a miserable death. 
There is a Chinese story of a soul which was lost in 
church: early one Sunday morning a mob gathered 
before the doors of the church at Ningpo, demanding 



152 COMPULSOKY ATHEISM 



admission. Their motive was a serious one. A 
weeping mother led the way, and she explained to the 
missionary that her little boy " had lost his soul in 
the church the day before, and she wished access to 
the interior to look for it." The child, who had been 
playing there, had been taken with a sudden fever 
on going home ; and was then delirious. In delirium 
the soul was supposed to be absent, still hovering in 
the hall of the church. Accordingly the relatives 
entered the church with a bundle of the boy's gar- 
ments, and prayed the strayed soul to perch on the 
bundle and return to its resting-place. This done, 
they departed, firmly persuaded that they had cap- 
tured the vagrant spirit of the lad. It is only a 
Chinese superstition, but it carries its own moral : the 
soul of religion is often lost in the church, and prayer 
must be offered for its return. 

Oh, brethren, the need of the dying world to-day 
is this " Something more 99 that Micah lacked. There 
is a mystic plus, a great beyond, an undiscovered 
country on beyond the sacraments and the ritual, if 
we could only find it. The center of the great Welsh 
Revival was said to be the " rediscovery of God." 
And I believe God stands ready to revive His formal 
Church as soon as it will put Him in place of His 
images. But there must be some heart-breaking 
demolition of altars first. I have read of a family 
who had built a new home, and being people of re- 
ligious tendencies, they had made a family altar of 
perfumed wood, and were considering where to place 
it. The mother insisted on its being placed in the 
kitchen, since that was the place of her trials. The 



COMPULSORY ATHEISM 153 



father, however, favoured the library, for a like 
reason. The son suggested the reception hall, where 
it might be seen by all visitors. The differences of 
opinion were so great that the family fell to quarrel- 
ing — and so the father referred the question to the 
little baby-girl. She was wont to sit before the fire- 
place and watch the flames ; and so, when the matter 
was left in her hands, she said, " The fire's nearly 
out. Let's put it on the fire." And so she threw 
the altar on the dying embers, and it soon burst into 
flames, the fragrance of the perfumed wood filling 
the house, The altar had fulfilled its mission, but it 
had to be cremated first. So may God destroy all our 
household gods, until He, whose right it is to reign, 
shall reign — 

" From sea to sea, and shore to shore 
Till moons shall wax and wane no more." 



X 



THREE GREAT ELEMENTS IN RELIGION 



HE text vindicates, it seems to me, the ex- 



istence of three fundamental elements in re- 



JL ligion. It falls from the lips of Jesus in 
connection with a most commonplace incident. He is 
not discussing the psychology of the soul, nor girding 
Himself for some great pronouncement. It is just 
one of His obiter dicta, a saying flung off by the way, 
and yet it contains in brief compass the whole 
philosophy of the Christian life. It is a plea for 
knowledge which issues in activity and brings happi- 
ness in its train: "If ye know these things, happy 
are ye if ye do them." 

What a great word it is for the twentieth cen- 
tury! For we live in a pragmatic age. The de- 
mand of the day is for a religion that works. The 
time was when a man was revered for what he 
knew, but now mere knowledge is discounted at the 
bank of reality. Then again, there was a time when 
the heart was elevated above the head, and a man was 
honoured because he felt. But in our rushing days 
the hand takes precedence of both head and heart, 
and the question asked of the applicant for fame is 



If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do 
them!' — John 13 : 17. 




r 54 



THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS Ds T EELIGION 155 



not u What do you know ? " nor u What do you feel ? " 
but " What can you do ? " 

" Fading away, like the stars of the morning, 
Losing their light in the glorious sun — 
Thus would we pass from the earth and its toiling, 
Only remembered by what we have done." 

It is related that a Japanese student at Tokio who 
had entered a Christian college purely for the sake of 
education, with the intention of retaining his Buddhist 
faith, was won to Christianity by a rare exhibition of 
doctrine incarnated in life. The students rebelled on 
account of the poor accommodations, and this Japa- 
nese was one of a deputation of two sent to remon- 
strate with Dr. Williams. The good man listened 
patiently to their grievance and then said, " I cannot 
let you suffer in this way, for I expect you one day 
to be the leaders of Japan. Now, I have a nice room 
with a southern exposure; you two must take that, 
and I will take your room." It was the speech of a 
Christian gentleman, who believed not merely in 
prating about the cross, but in " doing the doctrine," 
as the Koreans say. And this workable and work- 
ing faith won the young Japanese without further 
argument, reconciling him not merely to his room, 
but better still, to Christ. 

May I take an illustration from the business world, 
which may throw some light on the psychology back 
of this text? I ask the advertising man something 
of his program and I find that it is mightily like that 
of Jesus. He flings out in broad headlines his 
startling facts — first of all he must give informa- 
tion — the passer-by must know that hats are on sale. 



156 THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 



Then next he aims to touch the emotions and to in- 
spire the reader with the desire to own one of those 
hats. Now comes the crucial point of his whole 
transaction — he has utterly failed unless he has com- 
pelled the response of the will : that is, unless the in- 
formation and the desire have resulted in the act of 
purchase. He is not concerned that this chance 
stranger shall know that he is selling hats ; nor is he 
satisfied to make him want a hat; his object is to 
sell the man a hat. He must get results. And I 
believe our Lord Christ was something of a prag- 
matist, for He was not content with notions or even 
emotions, but insisted on motions. 

Religion has been defined as the soul's response to 
the revelation by which it is illumined, kindled and 
moved. You will observe that this definition in- 
cludes in its last three verbs the same elements I am 
discussing. There are some people for whom religion 
stops in the first stage — they are content to be il- 
lumined and so they believe in Christ historically. 
Again there are others with whom religion means the 
indulgence of feeling, and they stop at the kindling of 
the emotions. But the sort of Christian which Christ 
approves is the man who undergoes the discipline of 
obedience — he translates his creed into his life ; he is 
moved. 

Now it is interesting to observe that the three chief 
forms which religion has historically taken corre- 
spond to these three elements of human nature. 
The speculative form of faith is represented by 
theologians and philosophers, who are mainly inter- 
ested in a religion of the head. The ritual type is 



THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 157 



represented by priests, who are mainly interested 
in a religion of the heart. The legal form is rep- 
resented by the scribes, who are mainly interested 
in a religion of the hand. And these three species 
may be seen exemplified in three of the great re- 
ligious systems; that of the intellectual type in 
Brahmanism, that of the emotional in Buddhism, and 
that of the volitional or practical in Confucianism or 
Mohammedanism. It is our boast that Christianity 
is greater than any of these, in that it is not merely 
a system of thought, or a ritual of worship, or a 
fashion of life, but that it commands the whole man ; 
it is not merely knowing or enjoying or doing, but all 
of them in one. " If ye know these things, happy are 
ye if ye do them. ,, 

To put the same matter in another way, we say 
that to be a Christian involves three things: belief, 
confidence and trust. Belief is an intellectual proc- 
ess, confidence an emotional, and trust a volitional 
process. The first two are involuntary ; a man can- 
not compel himself to believe a statement, nor to re- 
pose confidence in the Man of Nazareth. But he can 
will to trust Him, and so hand over his life to His 
keeping. Perhaps Professor James, instead of writ- 
ing of "The Will to Believe " would have done 
better to have discussed " The Will to Trust." Let 
us proceed to notice these three elements in detail. 

/. Knowledge: "If Ye Know." 

You cannot build a house without a foundation. 
Nor can you build religious emotion on anything less 
stable than facts. The weakness of some present- 



158 THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 



day preaching is just in this: that it seeks to arouse 
emotions, without anything to base them on. Mr. 
Mallock in his book " Religion as a Credible Doc- 
trine 99 has a paragraph on " The uselessness of emo- 
tional apologetics/' in which he stresses this thought. 
He shows that the change in religious attitude and 
belief which the last sixty or seventy years have wit- 
nessed, has originated, not in a decline of the emotion, 
but in a decay of the beliefs which justified the emo- 
tion. The way to remedy the defect, therefore, is not 
to work oneself up into an excitement, but to appeal 
to the reason, that is, to show that religion is a cred- 
ible doctrine. A fireman keeps his engine going, not 
by applying the bellows to the smouldering coals, but 
by putting on more coal. 

It needs to be emphasized again that knowledge is 
power. " A wise man is strong ; yea, a man of 
knowledge increaseth strength." In spite of Rome's 
teaching to the contrary, ignorance is not the mother 
of devotion. Christianity is not a pious glorification 
of stupidity. A Christian is not a member of the 
Know-nothing party, and religion is not the same 
thing as superstition. Jesus never said " Blessed are 
the empty, for they shall be filled." Dr. Vance puts 
the same thought well : " Nature abhors a vacuum, 
and Grace does not glorify it." The brother who 
thanked God for his ignorance probably had a good 
deal to be thankful for. 

I read a sparkling article the other day on the 
Value of Ignorance. The author insists that it isn't 
well to know too much, and that Galileo and Coperni- 
cus and Columbus tore things up considerably by 



THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 159 



their discoveries. He seeks to prove his point by 
showing that every pioneer or inventor or saviour has 
been ostracized or spurned or crucified. Prometheus 
and Lucifer and Bruno and John Brown and Jesus 
of Nazareth all paid the price for interfering with the 
world's ignorance; for every new fact acquired be- 
comes the enemy of human happiness. Well, we can- 
not agree with these findings. Truth has been 
crushed to earth, but she rises again. She has been 
crucified between two thieves, but the long years have 
always justified her, soon or late. Accordingly our 
Lord has bequeathed us a religious system built on 
facts, and Christianity must either stand or fall by 
these facts. She welcomes investigation, and chal- 
lenges the microscopes and telescopes of a critical 
world to aid her in the discovery of truth. 

Mere knowledge, however, will not suffice. Dr. 
Patton has well shown that, judging the two men 
Paul and Christ merely by brain-power, so far as this 
can be judged by their recorded sayings, Paul was 
the bigger man of the two. There are other tests, 
however ; for transformation is better than informa- 
tion. Hell is full of learned heads, and a man may 
go to perdition repeating as he goes the articles of the 
Creed of Chalcedon. The Five Points of Calvinism 
will never in themselves build up robust Christian 
character, any more than an architect's blue-print will 
furnish a comfortable place to live. No, we must re- 
late truth to life — we must incarnate it, before it be- 
comes worth while. And I fear me there are many 
professed Christians who know religion just as the 
schoolboy knows South America; he can show you 



160 THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 



where it is on the map, but he has never been there. 
You can usually tell, when you hear two men describ- 
ing the same place, which one has been there and 
which one has read Stoddard's lectures. 

The matter of church creeds naturally suggests 
itself here. There was a day when a knowledge of 
the Confession of Faith was regarded as a prerequi- 
site for the Christian life ; but we have now come to 
see that all credal forms of expression fail to take the 
place of an experience of spiritual truth in the soul. 
The old elder who insisted on an answer to the 107 
questions of the Shorter Catechism, before he voted 
for the reception to church membership of a class 
of boys and girls, is dead ; and may he rest in peace. 
Granted that our modern youth know all too little 
of our doctrinal standards, yet we believe the shifting 
of emphasis has been justified. It is as though our 
Lord stood silent, listening to some glib recitation of 
the creed and then, when it was finished, quietly an- 
swered : " If ye know these things, happy are ye if 
ye do them." And across the intervening centuries 
there is wafted to us, as an echo of the text, the per- 
oration of the Sermon on the Mount : " Whosoever 
heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will 
liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon 
a rock. And the rain descended, and the floods came, 
and the winds blew and beat upon that house ; and it 
fell not: for it was founded upon a rock/' 

II. Emotion: " Happy Are Ye." 
The text says that it is a justifiable thing to be 
happy in religious work — in other words it suggests 



THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 161 



the place of emotion in the Christian life. The search 
for happiness has engaged the mind of man ever since 
man began to be. Now, Jesus Christ was no ascetic 
who bade men crucify the emotions; but a normal 
thinker who realized that each individual must have 
some beatitude. The thing He did, therefore, was to 
take that ideal, that Utopia, that beatitude and give it 
the richest possible content. He told the world of 
happiness-seekers that joy was to be found in doing 
known duty. 

Now, this is a new discovery of Jesus : that happi- 
ness is not an end to be sought in itself, but comes by 
the way. It cannot be manufactured directly, but is 
a by-product ; in making something else, you produce 
it accidentally. If you are journeying on the straight 
and narrow-gauge track of duty, Happiness gets on 
board at one of the way-stations ; but if you telegraph 
ahead for her to be sure to meet you, she will not be 
there. Josh Billings puts the thought in his quaint 
way: "If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, 
you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spec- 
tacles, safe on her own nose all the time." 

Assuming, then, that the Christian is bent on doing 
the will of God, he ought to be a happy man. We 
read that Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and that the joy set 
before Him held Him on His lonely way. It is true, 
as President Wilson says, that we do not live on intel- 
lectual planes at all, but on emotional planes, planes 
of resolution and not planes of doctrine. Therefore, 
we must in our preaching lay siege to the emotional 
level of the hearer's life, not because we are going to 
neglect the rest of his nature, but because this is the 



162 THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 



most inflammable plane of his being, and the presump- 
tion is that the fire which starts in the basement will 
burn to the attic. The hope is, that if we can reach 
his heart, we shall ultimately reach his will. In line 
with this was the judgment of Dr. Chapman the evan- 
gelist, who gave as one of the reasons why ministers 
fail, the fact that they try the wrong method of ap- 
proach, by the head, instead of by the heart. He 
held that argument invites argument, and for every 
point that you advance, the mind of your hearer ad- 
vances a dozen. The better avenue of approach is 
the broad highway of sorrow and joy which Jesus 
chose in the Sermon on the Mount — and, for ex- 
ample, instead of arguing the question of purity of 
heart in its effects on mind and life, He simply said : 
" Happy are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God." " 

You wouldn't want a religion which appealed only 
to the mind. Mr. Balfour has well shown in his 
" Foundations of Belief," that any system of religion 
which was small enough for our intellectual capacity 
could not be large enough for our spiritual needs. 
Romanes is a case in point: he had rejected Christi- 
anity because his head was not convinced by its argu- 
ments, and he refused to allow his heart to have any- 
thing to say. When he discovered that the heart was 
just as good a witness as the head, he let it plead its 
case, and to his surprise, it won ; and he came strag- 
gling back to God. 

Oh, give us a religion with a soul, with magnificent 
enthusiasms and splendid audacity. I like the man 
who rose in an inspiring meeting and said, " Mr. 



THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 163 



Chairman, I move we move the world." Let us have 
zeal, even though some of it may be zeal without 
knowledge. Why is it that many college men are 
failures? Because they are crammed full of facts — 
but so is a dictionary, and an encyclopedia. What 
is the trouble with a dictionary ? It is, that it cannot 
translate into emotion or action the things it knows. 
It will tell you several pages- full about missions, yet 
never enthuse over them. It will describe philan- 
thropies, yet never do a charitable deed. So what- 
ever you are, don't be a dictionary. If you know 
these things, why don't you do them ? 

Matthew Arnold's definition of religion comes to 
mind. " Religion is morality touched by emotion ; it 
is ethics heightened and kindled and lit up by f eeling." 
Ah, you cannot have Christianity without tears — you 
may have ethical culture without them. Unitarian- 
ism is religion without the Cross, without emotion, and 
is little better than philosophy. And I believe the 
reason why it does not challenge a larger public fol- 
lowing is simply because most men have a heart. 
And so, while emotion may be sadly overdone, yet 
God deliver us from doing away with it entirely, for 
it makes the dry bones of logic to live, and turns cold 
ethic into warm-blooded passion for the eternal God. 

///. Will: " If Ye Do Them." 

It is better not to know, than to know and not to do. 
This is good psychology and it is good theology. 
Professor Tames teaches it, and so does Paul. You 
remember the illustration which the Professor uses, 
of the Russian countess who sits at the theatre on a 



164 THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 



cold winter night. Her emotions are played upon by 
the sad scene depicted on the stage, and she sheds 
copious tears ; and yet all the while her coachman is 
shivering on the box of her carriage outside. She 
does herself a wrong to allow the emotion of pity to 
be excited by an imaginary case, while she refuses to 
allow it to play on the chords of daily life. Just here 
is the trouble with New Year's resolutions. As we 
pass from one year into the other we are temporarily 
impressed with the solemnity of the flight of time, and 
under the stress of momentary excitement, we make 
vows which we never intend to keep. And when the 
year has gone, we are reminded that the path to per- 
dition is paved with good resolutions, while the path 
to heaven is paved with good performances. By this 
test we can tell which way our path is tending. Do 
we take out our enthusiasm in mottoes framed on the 
wall, and pledges signed and put away into dusty 
archives ? Or do we translate our creed into charac- 
ter and our promise into performance ? 

Students of art will tell you that the reason why 
the arts attained so high a degree of perfection in the 
Middle Ages was because the men who had the mind 
to design and conceive worked out their ideas with 
their own hands. Raphael and Angelo and Cellini 
did their own work. They not only had visions, but 
they turned those visions into marble. In the lan- 
guage of my text, they not only knew, but also did. 
This same program will make a man not only an 
artist, it will make him a Christian. 

One of the greatest things which Jesus did for re- 
ligion was to make it practical in its nature. There 



THEEB GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 165 



are other systems of faith which merely require their 
devotees to memorize the creed or to turn the prayer- 
wheel mechanically. But Christ teaches a religion 
which finds a practical outlet into life. The Acts of 
the Apostles is not merely a New Testament volume, 
but a daily reincarnation of the spirit of the Naza- 
rene. We talk about translations of the Bible — do 
you know the best translation of the Bible I have ever 
seen? It is the Bible translated into life, into new 
manhood and womanhood and childhood. When 
Jesus took the twelve disciples into His school of 
training, His object was not to tell them a lot of new 
things and then graduate them with cap and gown 
and degree. No, He took them to transform their 
lives, and make them epistles known and read of all 
men. Instead of knowing books, they were to be 
books. 

The most amazing revival of the Church since 
Pentecost would break out to-morrow if its members 
would begin just to do what they know. The whole 
modern missionary movement goes back to that un- 
forgetable day when the cobbler Carey had the au- 
dacity to ask at a Baptist assembly if Christ's com- 
mand to the apostles to go into all the world and 
preach the Gospel to every creature was still binding. 
As soon as he knew, he went and did — and the world 
knows the rest. Carey is one of the heroes of mis- 
sions, and yet after all, all that he did was simply to 
make the connection between his intellect, his emo- 
tion, and his will. 

It all comes to this: whether we are willing to 
bridge the gap between theory and life. There are 



166 THREE GEEAT ELEMENTS IK RELIGION 



many other men besides Moses and Jonah and Ana- 
nias who have run away from duty. Many a man 
takes ship to carry his feet in the opposite direction 
from his head. He knows where he ought to go, but 
insists on buying his ticket the other way. The pic- 
ture of Jonah running away from the call of God, and 
buying his passage to Tarshish when duty lay in the 
direction of Nineveh, is a parable of life. "Are you 
going to spend your whole life saying ' ought ' ? " asks 
Bernard Shaw. " Turn your ' oughts 1 into ' shalls/ 
man." That is what we need to do. 

" I said : 1 Let me walk in the fields.' 
He said : ' No, walk in the town/ 
I said : " There are no flowers there. ,; 
He said : ' No flowers, but a crown/ 

" I said : ' But the skies are black ; 

There is nothing but noise and din/ 
And he wept, as He sent me back — 
1 There is more/ He said, 1 There is sin/ 

" Then into His hand went mine ; 
And into my heart came He ; 
And I walk in a light divine, 
The path I had feared to see." 

In the year 1900, foreigners of Pekin were be- 
sieged by the Boxers. The various powers had 
landed their forces near Tientsin. One morning a 
council of war was held in the latter city to determine 
whether the international army should march on the 
capital. One after another of the commanders — 
British, German, French, Russian and Japanese — rose 
and solemnly stated that the advance must necessarily 



THEEE GEEAT ELEMENTS IN EELIGION 167 



be futile. After all the rest had spoken, however, 
General Chaffee, the American commander, arose in 
his place, not to make a speech, but only to utter a 
single sentence. " I desire to say that the American 
troops will march for Pekin at 9 : 30 to-morrow morn- 
ing." And march they did. And the others went 
with them, and the siege was raised without a single 
serious battle. Do you know why General Chaffee 
was so determined in his stand? Because the day 
before that meeting in Tientsin he had received a 
cablegram from Secretary Root which read as fol- 
lows : " March at once on Pekin. The American 
nation is behind you/' Ah, my brethren, would that 
the soldiers of the Christ were as loyal as those of the 
United States. " If ye know these things, happy are 
ye if ye do them." 



XI 



THE PROGRAM OF A PROGRESSIVE LIFE 

"Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended; but 
this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, 
and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I 
press toward the mark for the prize!'— Phiuppians 3 : 13, 14. 

I LOVE the Epistle to the Philippians. It is a 
pastoral letter written by a preacher who had 
been arrested by the Roman Government, to a 
people whom he loved. I think Paul was more de- 
voted to the Philippians than to the people of any 
other church he had founded, because they stand out 
above all others for their cordiality to the man who 
had brought them the Gospel. Their church had now 
attained eleven years of growth, and yet had not for- 
gotten him. At this particular time Epaphroditus 
had arrived after a dangerous journey, bringing with 
him supplies for the Apostle's wants, and Paul sits 
down and writes a letter overflowing with apprecia- 
tion and gratitude. 

I wonder if I may make a comparison. Paul loved 
the people of his parish. So do I. They had re- 
sponded freely to Paul's needs and desires. So have 
mine. They were singularly free from the factions 
and troubles of many of these early churches. The 
same is true of my people. But Paul feared that just 
because things were going so well with them, they 
might become self-satisfied, and get into a rut of com- 

168 



PROGRAM OP A PROGRESSIVE LIFE 169 



placency, and cease to grow and develop in the Chris- 
tian life. So do I. Hence, he wrote them, when he 
was half through with his letter, the words of my 
text: this appeal for progress, this call to the heights, 
which I have taken for our meditation to-day. Is it 
not an appropriate message for us as we stand on this 
first Sabbath of our new Church year — the program 
of a progressive life : " Brethren, I count not myself 
to have apprehended ; but this one thing I do, forget- 
ting those things which are behind, and reaching forth 
unto those things which are before, I press toward the 
mark for the prize. ,, 

Did you ever see a man unlock his soul ? That is 
what Paul does here. He unlocks the safety deposit 
vault of his very being in these five verses which clus- 
ter about my text. He puts all the passion of his life 
into five w r ords : " that I may know Him." We 
stand in the holy of holies of the Apostle. He shows 
us the ground plan and specifications of that wonder- 
ful career. Here you have his Thirty-nine Articles, 
his Confession of Faith, his Shorter Catechism, 
Magna Charta, Declaration of Independence, Foot- 
path to Peace, — all in one. My text is his five- 
pointed star, his formula for success. Somebody 
once wrote a pamphlet entitled, " How to Succeed — 
Five Cents." Here Paul tells us without cost. Let 
us listen to him. 

You can very easily touch the five points of the 
star: "Brethren, I count not myself to have appre- 
hended" — first of all, a discontented present; "but 
forgetting those things which are behind" — a for- 
gotten past ; " and reaching forth unto those things 



170 PEOGEAM OP A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 



which are before " — a beckoning future ; " This one 
thing I do " — a unified aim ; " I press toward the goal 
for the prize " — a strenuous race. We have thus run 
around the circumference and touched the points of 
the star. Now, let us move in from the periphery to 
the center. Let us get at the heart of Paul's program 
if we can. 

/. A Discontented Present 

Well, there is hope for any man who begins that 
way: " Brethren, I count not myself to have appre- 
hended; I do not claim to have reached the top." 
These perfectionists who claim to be completely sanc- 
tified, these smug warriors against the Devil who go 
around wearing a sign saying, " The war is over — 
don't touch us, we're just waiting for wings/' — they 
get on my nerves. They remind me of so many of 
those Eastern people who come out here to spend 
their declining days. They have had the struggle and 
the fight back beyond the Mississippi, and they have 
come out here to die in peace, and they don't want 
God, or the Church, or the preacher, or anybody else 
that represents struggle or effort, to bother them. They 
say, "Let us alone." Did you know that the expression 
" Let us alone " occurs only twice in the Word of God 
— once in the Old Testament, and once in the New? 
In the Old Testament reference, the foolish Israelites 
said to Moses, " Let us alone, that we may serve the 
Egyptians." Away back there this plea was a denial 
of progress. "Let us alone. Don't lead us out. 
You might start something." And Moses certainly 
did. The New Testament reference is the cry of the 



PEOGEAM OP A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 171 



devils in the Capernaum synagogue : " Let us alone ; 
what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Naza- 
reth ? " And that is what the entrenched devils of 
crime and wrong always say : " Let us alone." But 
the sons of God always reply, " Carry on." 

So I am a preacher of discontent this morning. I 
am glad the Bible does not say much about being 
satisfied spiritually. " I shall be satisfied when I 
awake in thy likeness." In other words, don't adjust 
yourself comfortably in an easy chair and go to sleep, 
for you don't belong here ; you are due to go higher 
yet. Your motto is, " Excelsior." In Chesterton's 
story, " The Man Who Was Thursday," the men are 
named after the several days of the week, and the 
crowd get angry at the man who was Sunday, be- 
cause he stood for rest and quiet and contentment; 
while the man who was Thursday represents dissatis- 
faction with the present order, and the striving for 
better things. Sunday was the Stand-patter of the 
old regime, while Thursday was the Progressive who 
was trying to usher in through storm and tumult the 
better day; and between the two, my sympathies are 
more inclined to Thursday than to the other. 

The Present Tense is an awful tyrant. Over many 
a grave it might be written : " This man died of the 
present tense." God pity the man who could never 
say " To-morrow," and who could never say " Yes- 
terday," but must only say " To-day." What if you 
had neither memory nor imagination — nothing but 
toil? If the memory of yesterday were obliterated, 
and the hope of to-morrow banished, and nothing left 
but the work of to-day, a man would shrivel to a 



172 PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 

meager soul. I am not going to rest in the mud of 
to-day. I am going on to the stars of to-morrow. I 
am not going to take a fifty-year lease on this little 
home on the side street. I am going to have a brown 
stone front on the avenue. I am not going to do 
business in a two-by-four shop forever. I am going 
to have a department store some day. I am not going 
to ask for some sort of spiritual soothing syrup to lull 
me to sleep. I would rather pray for a thorn in the 
flesh to buffet me and keep me forever pegging, peg- 
ging on my way. 

Kipling puts the idea well for us in his poem, " The 
Explorer/' 

"'There's no sense in going further— it's the edge of 
cultivation ; ■ 

So they said, and I believed it, broke my land and 

sowed my crop ; 
Built my barns and strung my fences, in the little 

border station 
Tucked away below the foot-hills where the trails run 

out and stop." 

(Then the man seems to become satisfied with the 
present tense, and to lose the call of the beyond.) 

" Till a voice as bad as Conscience rang interminable 
changes 

On one everlasting whisper, day and night repeated — 
so: 

'Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look be- 
hind the Ranges — 

Something lost behind the Ranges ; lost and waiting 
for you — Go.' 

So I went, worn out of patience; never told my 
nearest neighbours." 



PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 173 



(Of course not; they would have glued him there.) 

"Then I knew the while I doubted, knew His hand 
was certain o'er me. 
Still it might be self-delusion — scores of better men 
had died. 

I could reach the township living, but . . • He 

knows what terrors tore me; 
But I didn't, but I didn't. I went down the other 

side." 

Nothing is more tragic than a lost ideal. Paul 
uses a word in this text which is significant. He 
says, " I am pressing toward the goal for the prize " 
— and what is the prize? Not the high calling of 
God— that's the old translation. The prize is the up- 
ward calling of God in Christ Jesus. You see there 
is the climbing still. Even the goal is not stagnation, 
but progress : so that there is no such thing as stand- 
ing still in the Christian life. The Christian is like a 
man riding a bicycle : he is either going on, or else he 
is going off. Here are two artists I bring before you 
for the sake of contrast. One, standing before his 
latest production, burst into tears exclaiming, " I shall 
never do anything great again, because I am satisfied 
with my work." There was the tragedy. His hand 
had caught up with his brain, and there was no room 
for growth. On the other hand, the widow of the 
great artist Opie said that in the nine years she was 
his wife she never once saw him satisfied with his 
work. Often he would enter the room and throw 
himself down in despair, crying, " I shall never be a 
painter as long as I live." That is the healthy dis- 
satisfaction which means progress. So it is in the 



174 PBOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIYE LIFE 



Christian life. I remember the letter which Dr. 
Speer says he received in the Foreign Mission Board 
office some years ago from a man on the Pacific Coast 
who was offering himself for missionary service, and 
he began by saying that he had entirely consecrated 
himself to the Saviour's work. He said he had been 
fully and completely baptized with the Holy Spirit, 
and he felt he was entirely qualified for the work re- 
quired of him. Dr. Speer's first comment after read- 
ing the letter was this : " Now, what can you do with 
a man like that? Is there any hope left for such a 
man? " The trouble, my friends, with the man was, 
that he had caught up to his stars. He forgot that an 
ideal is by hypothesis unrealizable, and the Foreign 
Board people thought that he had never read Philip- 
pians 3:12. I commend it to all who think they have 
graduated with honours from the University of the 
Christian Life. Ah, but give me, on the other hand, 
the men of the long look and the distant vision, who 
say: 

"We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man- 
stifled town; 

We yearned beyond the sky-line, where the strange 
roads go down." 

//. A Forgotten Past. 

Paul made a parenthesis in this letter. He had 
been talking about family trees, and he said : " Now, 
just by way of parenthesis, I will tell you something 
of my own family tree. The fact is, I am somebody." 
And then after telling them how his " ancestors came 
over in the Mayflower/' he says : " But don't misun- 
derstand me. I am not counting on social position. 



PEOGEAM OP A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 175 



I leave all that for Christ. To be sure, I have written 
some great epistles, and founded some noble churches, 
and been caught up into paradise, and heard things 
which it is not lawful for man to utter. But what- 
ever my past has been, I have forgotten it all. I am 
pressing on to Him." 

Now, it is a significant fact to me that God has so 
made us that we always face frontward. We turn 
our backs to what is behind us. What is more pathetic 
than to see a man with his face turned the wrong 
way? A friend of mine saw such a man in a museum 
in New York City, and he said: " He reminds me of 
some of the officers of my church ; he can never see 
a thing until after it has happened." Lot's wife is a 
standing illustration in Scripture of the tragedy of 
the backward look. At a time when progress was the 
demand of the hour, and her safety consisted in going 
forward, she insisted on looking back, with the result 
that she was enveloped by the salty flame ; and Jesus, 
looking back to her across the chasm of the centuries, 
said with warning voice, " Remember Lot's wife." 

Thank God, the Gospel I preach says a man can 
forget his past. When Byron's " Manfred " is dying, 
he summons the spirits to his bedside and asks them 
to wipe out his past, to which they make reply : " It is 
not in our power, it is not in our essence — but thou 
mayest die." And when he eagerly asks, " Will 
Death confer it on me ? " they make reply, " We are 
immortal, and do not forget." Of course there is a 
sense in which my past clings to me and hounds me 
like a shadow; but Jesus taught that a man belongs 
not to the place he is coming from, but to the place he 



176 PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 



is going to. That is why He said to the dying thief, 
" To-day — Paradise/' The place the man came from 
was Latrum, but Jesus made him a resident of his 
new home. The life he came from was awful. The 
life he was going to was clean and beautiful. Jesus 
turned him right about face for heaven. So when 
the scarlet woman was brought to Jesus, the differ- 
ence between the attitude of the Jewish policemen and 
the attitude of Christ was due entirely to the different 
things they were looking at. The men looked at what 
she was ; Jesus looked at what she was going to be. 
They said she was a sinner, and must be stoned. 
Jesus said, " Go into peace and purity." And away 
she went from her ramshackle, tumble-down past, out 
into the glorious light and liberty of the children of 
God. 

Christianity is the annihilation of Yesterday. One 
thing Jesus loves to do for a life is to shut the door 
on the room we call Yesterday, and open up the door 
of the room we call To-morrow. He likes to let a 
little sunshine in. You remember the man who came 
to Moses and said, " Aren't you the man who slew an 
Egyptian yesterday ? " Yesterday ! Who cares what 
you did yesterday? You don't belong to Yesterday. 
God owns it, and you have nothing more to do with 
it. It is in the cemetery, and your place is not among 
the tombs. God is willing to forgive all your blood- 
red yesterdays if you ask Him, and give you a cer- 
tificate entitling you to a clean To-morrow. Over in 
Dresden some years ago a sort of Jean Valjean was 
discovered. A certain Mr. Charles May, an author 
and a millionaire philanthropist, was living there, re- 



PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 177 



garded as one of the foremost citizens of the king- 
dom. Along came a socialist who unmasked his iden- 
tity, and proved him to have been a desperado of 
forty years before. That is always the way when 
somebody tries to live down his past: these unholy 
grave-diggers get together, and try to unearth the 
skeleton of the day before yesterday or the year be- 
fore last. In the name of the dying Jesus who for- 
gave the repentant thief, let bygones be bygones! 
This was Colonel Hadley's plan in the work of the 
Water Street Mission. He said he never inquired 
into the record of any one, no matter how dark it 
was ; for God was willing to forget, and why should 
not he do so ? 

777. A Beckoning Future. 

When David Livingstone broke fresh ground 
among the Bakkhatlas, he wrote to the London Mis- 
sionary Society explaining what he had done, and 
expressing hope of their approval. At the same time, 
he professed his willingness to go anywhere they 
wished to send him, with this one proviso: "Any- 
where, provided it be forward." That is a good 
motto for any life and for any Church : " Anywhere, 
provided it be forward." 

The thing that makes life worth while is the gap 
between the actual and the ideal. God has purposely 
made this gap pretty wide, and we have to fight our 
way out of the trenches of the past, over the no- 
man's-land of to-day, into the enemies' castles of to- 
morrow. How often you catch this note of struggle 
in Paul. Hear him in the Epistle to the Colossians, 



178 PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 



as he tells the people of Colosse that he is preaching 
and warning and teaching and labouring and striving 
and working — six verbs crowded into one sentence. 
Why ? " That we may present every man perfect in 
Christ Jesus." Hear him again when he says, " Till 
we all come to a perfect man, to the measure of the 
stature of the fullness of Christ." And listen again 
in the words of our own epistle : " That I may know 
Him, and the power of His resurrection, I put myself 
on the stretch," — that is the original — " I agonize, 
reaching forth to the prize and the goal beyond." So, 
I say, that is the thing that makes any life worth 
while, to have beyond itself a goal so big and high 
that life becomes a continual struggle to attain it. 

Now, Jesus Christ alone, of all religious teachers, 
offers you such a worthy goal. Confucianism, for 
example, puts the prize lower down, and within easier 
reach. When Mr. Wu Ting Fang was in this coun- 
try, he said that his criticism of Christianity was that 
it offered an unattainable goal, while Confucianism 
did not. But this is the blessing of Christianity in- 
stead of its curse. I remember hearing an old min- 
ister say : " I don't like that hymn, c I want to be an 
angel, and with the angels stand/ " He said : " I 
don't; I want to be a sinner, saved by grace." So 
say I, for the angels have never known the luxury of 
the struggle which you and I know. You college 
men know how they do in athletic meets. They have 
a receding goal. It is like what Paul calls " the up- 
ward calling." I have stood out in the stadium of old 
Washington University and watched the men in the 
pole-vault and the hammer-throw and the 220-yard 



PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 179 



dash. I remember especially in the case of the pole- 
vault, how the man would go over the tape at a cer- 
tain height, and then what happened? They hon- 
oured the man by giving him an ever heightening goal, 
so that he must continually say, " I press toward the 
mark for the prize." No matter if he had already 
broken the 'Varsity or the State record ; he must still 
fight on, for other honours were waiting to be won. 

William Watson puts it well in " The Dream of 
Man," when he represents God as saying to His 
creature, man, that the latter's lot was more blessed 
than His, because of the blessing of struggle. God 
is represented as saying : 

" I taste not the delight of seeking, 
Nor the boon of longing know ; 
There is but one joy transcendant, 
And I hoard it not, but bestow. 
I hoard it not, nor have tasted, 
But freely I give it to thee — 
The joy of most glorious striving, 
Which dieth in victory." 

IV. A Unified Aim. 

Paul could never do a thing half-way. He was an 
intense man. He threw his whole soul into what he 
did. He was not like the man described by the 
writer of an obituary in a country newspaper, who 
said the deceased had been a Christian " off and on 
for forty years." No, Paul was either entirely off or 
entirely on. He knew it was dangerous to be half 
on and half off. When he was a lad sitting at the 
feet of Gamaliel, he did just one thing: he got an edu- 
cation. When he grew up and became an orthodox 



180 PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 



Pharisee, he did just one thing: he made it hot for 
any Christians who came his way. When he was 
converted by that divine sunstroke on the Damascus 
highway, he asked just one question: "What wilt 
thou have me to do ? " And from that time on he 
could say, as one of the later saints of the Church 
said : " I have but one passion : it is He." 

Need I illustrate the power of concentration in 
daily life? We all recognize it. When the famous 
DeWitt, one of the busiest statesmen of his time, was 
asked how he was able to do so many things, he said 
that his whole art consisted simply in doing one thing 
at a time. A friend asked Sir James Scarlett what 
was the secret of his preeminent success as a lawyer, 
and he replied that he always took care to press home 
the one principal point of the case, without paying 
much heed to the others; he hammered home one 
point. And just as the world has always said, " Beware 
of the man of one book," so we may equally well say: 
" Beware of the man of one aim ; look out for the man 
of the single eye." St. Jerome was pastor of a large 
congregation, but he had one burning ambition. He 
said to his people : " It is of necessity that the New 
Testament should be translated. You must find an- 
other preacher. I am bound for the wilderness, and 
shall not return until my task is finished." So away 
he went with his manuscripts into the desert, and 
laboured and prayed until the task was done, and he 
gave to the world the Latin Vulgate, which will last 
until the end of time, because he was a man of the 
unified aim. And so it is always. Boys who like 
Confucius' son try to master too many things, who 



PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 181 



scatter their energies too widely, need a wise father 
to say to them, as Confucius did, " Omit some of 
your pursuits, and you will get on better." 

The business world has long since applied this 
motto of Paul's. Big business advertises for special- 
ists, not for " also rans." The world wants a man 
who can set type, sell insurance, run a Corliss engine, 
write a poem, paint a sunset, preach a sermon, better 
than any other available man. It won't do for a man 
to reply, " I can paint a little, and write a little, and 
preach a little." No, the world would say to such an 
one: "You remind us too much of a crazy-quilt. 
You suggest succotash. What we want is an expert." 
And for a motto the world goes back to Paul : " This 
one thing I do." 

Now then, it remains for me to say that we ought 
to have kingdom specialists as well as worldly spe- 
cialists. If Edison could sit up all night to make his 
machine pronounce the letter S, it seems to me some- 
body else should sit up all night to save a soul. If 
people will canvass the city for Liberty Bonds, it 
seems that other folks might canvass the city for 
Foreign Missions. You run on your track, and let 
me run on mine. But just because your engine pulls 
into a station called Business Success, and mine pulls 
into a terminal marked Heaven's Approval, that does 
not mean that your engine ought to work any harder 
than mine. Oh, men and women of the successful 
business career, give some of that splendid energy 
over here to the engine on the other track, so that 
Jesus Christ and His cause may go over the top as 
well as everything else. 



182 PEOGEAM OP A PEOGEEflSIVE LIFE 



V. A Strenuous Race. 

Paul proceeds here on the method of postponed 
surprises. He lifts the curtain just an inch at a time. 
He keeps us on tiptoe waiting for his main verb. 
Everything else has been in the nature of a participle 
statement. Let me rewrite the text thus : " Breth- 
ren, not being satisfied with present attainment (yes, 
there is the discontented present), and forgetting 
those things which are behind (yes, there is the for- 
gotten past), reaching forth unto those things which 
are before (the beckoning future), this one thing I 
do." (Well, hurry up, Paul; tell us what it is; you 
have kept us waiting so long for the main verb) : " I 
press toward the goal." " There it is," says Paul, 
" I am using the figure of a Roman runner." 

Now, let us see how aptly the figure applies. 
Fancy a runner, a trained athlete, down in the Roman 
stadium, with the balconies full of eager eyes watch- 
ing him and the other contestants as they strive for 
the mastery. Well, of course it stands to reason at 
the outset that he must be dissatisfied with present 
attainment, for if he is perfectly content he will stand 
where he is, and all the others will pass him by. No 
hero was ever bound by the chains of the present 
tense. Then again, he must forget those behind 
him. Often you will hear the trainer giving direc- 
tions to the athlete, such as to count his steps and 
watch the footprints of the men in front of him, but 
you will never hear him tell him to look around at 
those behind : not at all ; he forgets the rear, and he 
courts the front. Then again, he reaches forth unto 
those things which are before, keeping his eye ever 



PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 183 



fastened on the judges' seat. He concentrates. He 
does just one thing. For him the whole universe is 
shut out that day, and there is only one thing worth 
while, and that is, winning that race. Fancy some- 
body calling from the sidelines, " Oh, runner, your 
house is on fire." He would reply : " Never mind ; 
let the fire company put it out; I am winning this 
race." Fancy another saying, " Oh, athlete, quick ! 
your bank has gone to the wall, and the investments 
of the years are lost." " Never mind ; let Wall Street 
worry about the bank at the wall ; I have no time to 
stop now ; I am winning this race." So you come to 
the last thing Paul says: " I press toward the goal. 
I put myself on the stretch. I expect no seven-league 
boots to carry me over the course. I shall fight my 
way to victory." 

Isaac Watts was certainly a typical Christian ath- 
lete when he wrote the words : 

" Must I be carried to the skies 

On flowery beds of ease, 
While others fought to win the prize, 

And sailed through bloody seas ? 
Are there no foes for me to face? 

Must I not stem the flood? 
Is this vile world a friend to grace, 

To help me on to God? 
Sure I must fight if I would reign; 

Increase my courage, Lord : 
I'll bear the toil, endure the pain, 

Supported by Thy Word." 

I remember so well an incident of my college days. 
Dr. Hall, our Professor of Greek, had a boy known 
all over the college as " Son Will." Will was not 



184 PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 



fond of Greek, but he could run. So on the long hot 
afternoons, while the rest of us pegged away at Greek 
drama, Son Will would be excused, and would go out 
on the 'Varsity course and train. When the day of 
the meet came, the boy's mother asked Dr. Hall if he 
were going out to see Will run. The Professor re- 
plied in the negative. " Why, Will couldn't win any- 
thing ; he couldn't even parse a Greek verb " — which 
was conclusive logic. Well, to make a long story 
short, the Professor went. At first he looked on lan- 
guidly. He did not care to have anybody know he 
was there. He knew Will couldn't win. As the 
athletes started out, Will was last. There were six 
runners, and he was No. 6. Dr. Hall said to him- 
self, " I told you so." After the first lap, however, 
Will had passed No. 5, and was fifth himself. After 
the second lap, he was fourth. After the third lap, he 
was third. Then he began to let himself out ; he had 
been husbanding his strength ; and Dr. Hall said lie 
found himself reaching for his handkerchief. After 
the fourth lap Will was second in the race, and they 
had only one more lap to run. Just as the racers 
passed the spot opposite to the grandstand, with half 
a lap yet to go, Dr. Hall found himself waving his 
handkerchief frantically, and crying out, " Go it, 
Will!" Will sprinted up and passed his opponent, 
and dashed home winner. Then Dr. Hall turned to 
the bystanders and said, " That is my boy." Will 
had pressed toward the goal for the prize. 

Now, my friends, you and I are athletes too, after 
a bigger prize than Will was after, " the upward call- 
ing of God in Christ Jesus." We are not always 



PEOGEAM OF A PEOGEESSIVE LIFE 185 



overwhelmed with rosebuds, or deafened by applause. 
We sometimes think the people in the grandstand do 
not care whether we win or lose. But we take heart 
when we remember that Paul won, and Jesus of 
Nazareth won, and countless others have won, with- 
out much applause. So we patiently keep on, and if 
we fall one of these days — well, I have made up my 
mind I shall just ask three questions of the kindly 
soul who picks me up off the dusty race-track of life : 
"Was I far from the goal?" "Yes, a long ways 
off." " Were there many others ahead of me ? 99 
" Yes, there were many who were nearer to the goal, 
better acquainted with Jesus Christ, and more devel- 
oped into His likeness than you." Well, just one 
more question : " Was my hand reaching forward 
when I fell? " " Yes." « Then I die in peace," 



xn 

GOD'S STANDARD MAN 

"As his custom was." — Luke 4: 16. 

EVERYTHING is being standardized these 
days. Efficiency tests are all the rage. We 
are marked so much on our sleeping, breath- 
ing, eating, thinking, to see whether we can make a 
passing grade. Our soldier boys had to be of a cer- 
tain height and build, and just before they embarked 
there was an examination of their teeth. They had 
endurance tests, nerve tests, sight tests, and almost 
every other test. Not only our soldier boys, but our 
babies as well, are measured and weighed and cata- 
logued and listed : so that all you have to do is to com- 
pare your child with the standardized, idealized, per- 
fect child, in order to see what percentage of health 
he has. The idea of standardization is entering every 
domain. Our movies must come up to certain re- 
quirements, else they shall not pass. Our milk must 
have so much butter fat, else it may not be sold. Our 
examination for life insurance must grade such and 
such, else we are declined with thanks. Our pails 
and scales must be approved by the inspector of 
weights and measures. Our autos must climb the 

186 



GOD'S STAND AED MAN 187 



Sixth Street hill on high. Our watches must be 
graded by the Kew test for heat and cold and double 
positions. Our safety appliances must be examined 
by the public inspector thereof. Our Browning guns 
and Liberty motors must be scrutinized to the last de- 
tail. Our giving must be up to a certain quota, else 
our city will fail to reach its standard and go down in 
disgrace. So it goes. 

Now the only thing that gives us pause in all this 
is whether our standards themselves are correct. I 
do not want to set my watch by a regulator if the 
regulator itself is wrong. And yet, I cannot expect 
perfection anywhere on earth. Mrs. Gatty in her 
" Parables from Nature " tells of a young minister 
who was something of a musician, who in an emerg- 
ency undertook to tune the church organ. He tuned 
it perfectly according to the scale of notes used, but 
when he struck the keys of Haydn's Mass in five 
flats, dreadful discord was the result; and an organ 
tuner afterwards explained to him that his scale 
was right, and his system right, but too close adher- 
ence to a perfect tone was his trouble. Most fifths 
had to be left a little flat, some few sharp, and the 
octaves alone tuned in unison, because the organ is an 
imperfect instrument. Wonderful music is possible 
by allowing for a degree of imperfection. This is a 
parable of human life. We have to tone down our 
standards for the sake of harmony and peace. 

** There's a fleck of rust on a flawless blade, 
On the armour of price there's one ; 
There's a mole on the cheek of a lovely maid, 
There are spots on the sun." 



188 GOD'S STANDAED MAN 



Here, then, is my main proposition. War has de- 
moralized many of our old standards. Many have 
become colour-blind to moral distinctions. The old 
Greek said, " Panta rei," " Everything flows ; M and in 
the flux of these days and the storm of the times, 
some of the old piers we used to tie up to are in 
danger of being washed away. Therefore, if there is 
anything permanent, anything stable to which we can 
tie, any unalterable standard by which we can judge 
ourselves, let us to it by all means, and see what we 
register. This is what the artist does in working 
with colours. He fears that he may become confused 
in his judgment of shades, and hence keeps certain 
standard pigments on his palette all the while that he 
may compare his judgment with them when he fears 
to trust himself. So in the realm of moral standards, 
we turn to one White Life which was lived as man 
has never lived before or since. Jesus of Nazareth 
standardized manhood. He was a one hundred per 
cent. Christian. He passed God's efficiency test, and 
this was his diploma : " This is my beloved Son, in 
whom I am well pleased. Hear ye him." 

I am aware that there are many who do not accept 
Him as their example. One of our modern thinkers 
has said that there is something incongruous in the 
idea of the twentieth century Christian modeling his 
life on that of a first century Jew. There are others 
who, like Emerson, do not regard Him as the ultimate 
manifestation of Deity. They are well answered by 
the argument of the gentle-souled Whittier, who re- 
plied to Emerson that if Jesus was not the ultimate, 
He was at least the best representation of God who 



GOD'S STANDAKD MAN 189 



had yet appeared on this earth. Therefore, until 
further notice it was the part of wisdom to follow 
Him. So I hold Him up to you as the nearest stand- 
ard ideal Life the world has ever seen, and I say if 
we can get an idea of what His customs of life 
were, they will contain suggestions worthy of our 
following. 

Now the visit of Jesus to Nazareth gives us a 
bird's-eye view, a pen picture, so to speak, of some 
characteristics of a standard Christian life. Let jyts 
notice them in turn. 

/. The Standard Christian Life Begins in a Chris- 
tian Home. 

There is something very beautiful, at the same time 
pathetic, to my mind, in the scene before us. It is the 
springtime of the year, and at the same time the 
springtime of Jesus' ministry. He has just been 
through the baptism of the Spirit and the temptation 
in the wilderness, and here at the threshhold of His 
public ministry He turns for His inaugural service to 
His old home. How naturally His fc?t took the fa- 
miliar road to Nazareth ! How often He had roamed 
through its streets with His friends, and climbed the 
hill back of the town for a view of the valley in one 
direction and the mountains in the other! Yes, He 
loved Nazareth just as any man loves the place where 
he has been brought up. There is no place so dear 
to me as Baltimore. I lived on an ugly old cobble- 
paved street in a humble part of town, but my heart 
throbs whenever we near Baltimore. On my recent 
Eastern trip, when the train entered Maryland I went 



190 GOD'S STANDAKD MAN 



and stood on the rear platform, to be able to see in all 
directions, because it was my beloved Maryland. 

Very well. Let this geographic fact become a 
moral truth to us. The tendency of adult life is to 
revert to the Nazareth where we have been brought 
up. How important, then, that that Nazareth should 
be the proper kind. Science tells us that the brain is 
plastic in youth, and the paths made in the brain by 
youthful impressions are much deeper and more last- 
ing than those of mature life. So it has been well 
said : " Convert a man, and you win an individual ; 
convert a child, and you win a multiplication table." 
The seed there sown will spring up into an abundant 
harvest. In every schoolroom throughout British Co- 
lumbia notices are posted which read : " Stop — Look 
— Listen." You see the idea. If they can implant 
the idea of caution in the minds of those children, the 
winds may blow down all the signs with which the 
roads are at present placarded : the youngsters won't 
need them, for they will have an inward monitor; 
they were taught caution at Nazareth, and the man 
always comes back sooner or later to the streets where 
the boy played. 

The Church has not awakened to this fact, and 
hence the modern emphasis on religious education. 
Nobody ever heard of directors of religious education 
a few years ago. They were born because society dis- 
covered the importance of Nazareth. Why, if Naza- 
reth is growing children, Nazareth is a thousand fold 
more important place than the college, which is grow- 
ing scholars, or the barracks, which is growing sol- 
diers, or the seminary, which is growing preachers. 



GOD'S STAND AED MAN 191 



Very well, how is your Nazareth getting on ? " What 
is my Nazareth ? " you say. Well, your Nazareth is 
a composite place. It is the nursery where the boy 
plays. It is the whole atmosphere he absorbs. It is 
the street where he romps, and the friends he makes. 
It is the public or private school. It is the Sunday 
school where he learns about God and Christ. Are 
you giving the attention it deserves to Nazareth? 
For if Nazareth is neglected, there is no use in trying 
to make up for it by getting awfully interested in 
Jerusalem or Samaria later, for Nazareth is the place 
where the battle is either won or lost. 

Alberta, Canada, has an official branch of the gov- 
ernment known as the Department of Neglected Chil- 
dren. Every city needs one such. How many 
Topsies there are who were never trained, but just 
growed. Of course I am not denying the fact that 
God's grace can reach out and capture men and 
women far beyond the nursery age. God can find a 
man in Samaria if he has got away beyond both 
Bethlehem and Nazareth, and as long as He reaches 
him before Calvary the man may be saved. But how 
much better to win him at Nazareth ! Somebody has 
figured out how much cheaper it is to prevent a youth 
from going wrong than to cure him after he has gone 
wrong ; and while I have not the figures at hand, the 
contrast is startling. Here, then, is a plea to all par- 
ents for some attention to Nazareth. If Joseph and 
Mary have been blessed by high heaven with the gift 
of a son, then in heaven's ledger they are debited with 
that amount, and to balance the account they should 
be able to present that boy one day a Christian man 



192 GOD'S STAND AED MAN 



before the presence of the King with exceeding joy. 
At least, they* ought to be able to certify that they have 
done their part ; and God will then tell the recording 
angel to credit them with the salvation of the boy who 
was loaned to them for training so many years ago. 

//. The Standard Christian Life Recognizes the 
Value of Proper Habits. 

"As His custom was." Oh, well, then, the cantor 
of the synagogue didn't look up in surprise when 
Jesus entered. He didn't say to himself, " Somebody 
must be ill at Mary's house, and they are suddenly 
getting pious." Jesus wasn't like those people who 
only come to church when there is a wedding, or a 
funeral, or a friend coming from the East to visit 
them. No, He was a regular. The Book says it was 
His custom to go to church. Without going any 
further at present than these words, " as His custom 
was," I wish to call your attention to the necessity of 
forming proper habits in the Christian life. 

What is habit ? Psychologically, a habit is an ave- 
nue in the gray matter of the brain. The first time 
you do a thing you cut the road, and every succeeding 
time you dig the road deeper, until finally you do the 
thing automatically, and you say : " Oh, I never have 
to think about that; it is just second nature to me." 
Well, the fact is, you have cut the road so deep that 
the wheels can't get out of the track if they try to. 
But this is Scripture as well as physiology. Take 
that verse of the Eighty-fourth Psalm, " Blessed is 
the man whose strength is in thee, in whose heart are 
the ways of them." I used to wonder what it meant. 



GOD'S STAND AED MAN" 193 



Take the new translation. The revised version says 
14 in whose heart are the highways to Zion." There 
you have it. There are highways in the heart long 
before there are highways on the map. So the Psalm- 
ist is thinking about some humble Jew who has so 
often travelled in thought up to the Temple that the 
highways in his heart or brain are tramped as hard as 
the Roman roads which Caesar built. We all have 
highways in the heart, and we ought to build these 
roads to the right places. 

Habit can be made either our enemy or our friend, 
according to the construction of these highways. 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and philosopher that 
he was, ruined his career by becoming enslaved with 
the opium habit. " As his custom was," he took the 
drug day by day. Hartley Coleridge, a brilliant son, 
formed the habit of intemperance. " As his custom 
was," he took one drink, and then another, until he 
was a wreck at thirty-five and a corpse at forty-seven. 
This was the man, by the way, who had written sev- 
eral tragedies at the age of nine, was an accomplished 
Greek scholar at twelve, and a fellow of Oxford at 
twenty. He failed because of wrong habits. Ben- 
jamin Hay don, the painter, was hailed as the greatest 
artist of centuries on his arrival in London. Scott 
and others went wild with delight over his work. 
Yet he paid no attention to proper customs, but im- 
patiently cried, " Genius was sent into the world not 
to obey laws but to give them." " As his custom 
was," he laughed at limits, and he died the death of a 
pauper, a debtor, and a suicide. A celebrated count 
fell into the habit during his Nazareth years when in 



194 GOD'S STAND AED MAN 



the nursery, of begging the nurse for ten minutes' 
more play before being put to bed. It followed him 
through life, and when as a captain he found himself 
with his men in a perilous place, " as his custom was/' 
he delayed ten minutes too long, and sacrificed him- 
self and his braves to the enemy. 

But the picture is not all black. Habit can be made 
a friend as well. That is the great truth which is 
taught in Locke's " The Glory of Clementina." A 
certain Quixtus has become cynical at the age of 
fifty. He believes goodness is a mockery, and hence 
plans at one turn of the wheel to become a three-ply 
devil. In a passion of bitter rage, he swears all the 
evil things he intends to do. But he had failed to 
reckon on one thing: he had the habits of fifty upright 
years to contend with, and he soon discovered that the 
customs of half a century could not be overturned in 
a moment. Nazareth bore fruit, and the fifty years' 
training saved the day for God. Since this is so, let 
us set about the formation of the right kind of re- 
ligious habits, for the great laws of habit apply just 
as much in the spiritual world as they do in the phys- 
ical God knew that we were creatures of habit when 
He crowded the Sabbath in, once in every seven days. 
We don't leave other things to chance. Why should 
we pray just when the notion strikes us? We don't 
eat that way. Your employer does not pay you that 
way. Why treat your soul that way ? Why not have 
a schedule for salvation, as well as for soup and 
baths? The fact is, that it is only in comparatively 
recent times, and in connection with Protestant 
churches especially, that the power of habit has been 



GOD'S STASTDAKD MAN 195 



neglected. Under the Romish system, all the details 
of life were laid down for monks and nuns, as well 
as for the laity : so many hours for devotion, so many 
for sleep, so many for eating, etc. Now, this can 
easily become abused, and all rules become ridiculous 
when carried to excess. Custom hardens into law, 
and instead of being a convenience, becomes a bur- 
den. But the fact that a thing can be abused is no 
reason why it should not be rightly used. And so I 
commend to you that you make your religion more 
businesslike, as well as your business more religious. 
I believe in the Christian who gives one-tenth of 
his money and one-seventh of his time to the Lord 
as a matter of custom and habit. Therefore do I be- 
lieve that those four little words of my text are so 
important, that they should be printed not only on the 
church calendar, but on the hearts of every con- 
gregation. 

777. The Standard Christian Life Recognizes the 
Value of Church Attendance. 

What do we read ? " He went into the syna- 
gogue." That is why I smile at people who say they 
do not need to go to church. They are so spiritual 
that they have gotten above the need of such primitive 
things as public worship. Indeed! I always feel 
like saying to them this : " My brethren, do you re- 
member the very first thing Jesus did after He had 
received the baptism of the Spirit, and proved Him- 
self conqueror over the Tempter? According to 
Luke, the very first thing He did was to go to church. 
Now, if any human being ever had the right to say 



196 GOD'S STAND AED MAN 



the Church was not a necessity for him, Jesus had; 
and yet, He was not too good or too holy or too bril- 
liant to go. Oh no, my friends, you will have to fetch 
up a mighty big argument to answer me on that propo- 
sition, for over against all you say I shall simply pre- 
sent that one picture of the Son of God a humble 
worshipper at the ordinary synagogue service at 
Nazareth that day." 

To make the point clearer, let me describe to you 
the service Jesus attended. The synagogue, as you 
know, was an institution which grew up not by divine 
appointment, but in response to the exigencies of the 
situation, possibly in the time of Ezra. By the time 
of Christ, the order of service was fixed and invari- 
able. The supreme moment of the service was the 
reading of the law, — not the sermon, as with us. The 
reading of Scripture was preceded by the opening 
prayer, and in this prayer there were several distinct 
portions. It began with the recitation of the Shema 
(three passages in Deuteronomy 6, Deuteronomy n 
and Numbers 15). Then came the eighteen blessings. 
During this recitation the people stood with faces 
turned toward Jerusalem. The reciter of the prayer 
stood before the chest containing the manuscript. 
Any member of the assembly could be called upon 
by the president to perform this duty, and Jesus very 
likely took His turn at these opening prayers. The 
people answered with a loud " Amen " at the close of 
each petition. Then came the reading of the law. 
The Chazzan took the sacred roll out of the chest, 
removed the case, and placed it before the first reader. 
The seven members chosen for the reading of the law 



GOD'S STAND AED MAN . 197 



rose in turn, and read some three verses each. The 
Chazzan remained all the time close to the reader, and 
watched that he made no mistake, and read nothing 
unsuitable for a general audience. After the reading 
was added a sort of commentary or homily, which 
later developed into the sermon in Christian churches. 
When the reading of the law was over, the one who 
recited the opening prayer read a portion from one of 
the prophets. This was called the closing lesson, be- 
cause it completed the service. The reader read 
three verses, and then translated them into Aramaic. 
In the story before us 9 Jesus read this closing passage 
in the synagogue at Nazareth. You observe that 
Jesus read only two verses, and this was allowable 
because He wished to make some comment upon 
them ; and so instead of reading three verses without 
comment, He read two, and then preached a short 
sermon. After the sermon, the final benediction was 
pronounced, and the assembly broke up. 

This, then, will give you some idea of the service 
Jesus attended that day. Think you there was any- 
thing particularly thrilling or inspiring to Him in such 
a service? Yet, He went. And why? Well, I can 
tell you several things that did not induce Him to 
go. He did not go merely because it was customary, 
or popular, or conventional, for Jesus was delight- 
fully unconventional when occasion demanded it. He 
would not have perjured His soul just to do what 
others were doing. Again, He did not go to show 
off His new clothes, for He did not have any so far 
as we know. He did not go to meet His friends, as 
though the Church were a social club. Nor did He go 



198 GOD'S STAND AED MAN 

to hear fine music, or an elaborate sermon, or lengthy 
announcements. He did not go to get new business, 
or more votes, or a higher social standard. No, He 
went for none of these things. Well, why, then, did 
He go ? To answer the question, we must remember 
that the whole Old Testament presupposes the public 
worship of God. There is no explicit command, 
either in the Old or New Testament, so far as I know, 
which positively enjoins public worship, but it is 
taken as an assumed fact all the way from Deuteron- 
omy 12 : 5 to Hebrews io: 25 : " Even unto his habi- 
tation shalt thou seek, and thither shalt thou come. ,, 
" Not forsaking the assembling of yourselves to- 
gether, as the manner of some is." So our Lord 
placed the stamp of His approval upon the custom of 
going to public worship, both to glorify God and to 
encourage fellow worshippers. The Christian, then, 
who passes up public worship must have some later 
revelation from the Almighty to that effect which the 
Scriptures know nothing of, and he must be a supe- 
rior individual to Jesus Christ, who found it necessary 
to go. James Freeman Clarke puts it pretty well 
when he says : " The sermon might be stupid : then I 
should not listen to it. The prayers might not suit 
me: then I should pass them by. The music might 
grate on my ear: I should try not to hear it. One 
would be there, greater than the temple, greater than 
its prayers, its liturgy, its priests, its ritual: my 
brother man, bowed before my Father, God. If I 
did not go to church for anything else, I should go 
for this." 



GOD'S STAND AED MAN 199 



IV. The Standard Christian Life Recognizes the 
Value of Sabbath Observance. 

I like to ask three questions with reference to the 
visit of any person to any place: Where did he go? 
Why did he go ? When did he go ? Suppose I tell 
you, then, that Jesus found Himself in Nazareth one 
day ; the question you naturally ask is : Where will 
Jesus go in Nazareth? Then, why did He go? and 
when did He go ? We have the three answers. He 
went to the synagogue, for the purpose of worship, 
on the Sabbath Day. The Jewish synagogues of the 
time were open every day for three services; but as 
those of the afternoon and evening were always 
joined, there were really only two. It was the duty 
of every godly Jew to go to each service, for daily 
attendance was regarded so sacred that the Rabbis 
taught that he who went regularly saved Israel from 
the heathen. Three days, however, were especially 
sacred. These were Monday and Thursday, which 
were market days, when the country people came into 
town and the courts were held; and then of course 
the weekly Sabbath was the third special day for wor- 
ship, and hence Jesus went on the Sabbath Day to the 
synagogue. 

In order that we may have a sane standard in this 
matter of Sabbath observance, let me contrast the 
attitude of Jesus to that of the time in which He 
lived. We learn from the Mishna some of the 
peculiar customs and laws of the time. The day be- 
fore the Sabbath was called the day of preparation, 
on which all work must be finished. A tailor might not 
go out carrying his needle near dusk on Friday even- 



200 GOD'S STANDARD MAN 



ing, lest he forget and carry it a moment after sunset, 
for this would be breaking the Sabbath, which of 
course began at sunset on Friday night. If a house- 
wife started to fry meat, onions, or eggs before sun- 
set, she must make sure to have them done before the 
Sabbath began. In the case of our Saviour's death 
on the cross at three o'clock Friday afternoon, Joseph 
and his friends had to finish the temporary burial and 
reach their homes before sunset. This explains the 
haste with which Jesus was taken down from the 
cross, and also the fact that the embalming of His 
body could not be finished until Sunday morning, 
spices being prepared after sunset Saturday night. 
A person could not walk on the grass with nailed 
shoes on the Sabbath, for this was a kind of thresh- 
ing. One could not catch an insect on one's body, for 
this was a kind of hunting. It was seriously debated 
whether you ought to eat a fresh egg on Sunday, be- 
cause the egg had probably been prepared by the hen 
on the Sabbath' Day, and therefore you ;were encourag- 
ing the hen to break the day of rest. If a man was 
suffering from toothache, he was forbidden to take 
vinegar in his mouth if he spat it out again, but he 
was allowed to take it if he swallowed it. A sailor in 
a storm would refuse to touch the helm after sunset. 
As late as 1492, when the Jews were expelled from 
Spain, they were reduced to living on grass; yet on 
the Sabbath they would not pluck the grass with their 
hands, but groveled on their knees and bit it off with 
their teeth. A few years ago in Jerusalem a fire 
broke out in the Jewish quarter on Saturday; but as 
the law forbade kindling fires on the Sabbath, thex 



GOD'S STANDARD MAN 201 



supposed it also forbade extinguishing a fire, and 
consequently three young girls were burned to death 
who could easily have been rescued. So the Jews 
have been known for centuries all over the world for 
their readiness to die rather than break the Holy Day. 

Into the midst of this superstition came the sane 
and standard Christ. Now, He must be very care- 
ful, for He knew His example would guide His fol- 
lowers all through the years to come. How did He 
observe the Sabbath Day? That is a fair question, 
and I think it may be answered in three simple state- 
ments: (a) Jesus by His actions upheld the general 
use of the Sabbath Day as a day of rest and worship. 
He observed the usual requirements of the law, ex- 
cept when these conflicted with some higher principle. 
It was customary then, as now, to give a festive turn 
to the day by wearing the best clothes and having 
the best provisions obtainable, and Jesus probably 
fell in with these and other innocent requirements. 
(&) Jesus held that the well-being of man was more 
important than the rigid observance of the Sabbath 
as interpreted by the Scribes. He believed in a sound 
mind in a sound body, and hence performed many 
acts of healing on that day. (c) Jesus taught that 
the ceremonial observance of the Sabbath should give 
way before any higher or more spiritual motive. 
One manuscript inserts the following words after 
Luke 6:5:" On the same day, seeing one working on 
the Sabbath, He said unto him, O man, if thou know- 
est what thou doest thou art blessed; but if thou 
knowest not, thou art accursed and a transgressor 
of the law." That is to say, the man is pronounced 



202 



GOD'S STANDAKD MAN 



blessed if he is breaking the trammels of the law in 
response to some higher call ; but if not, he is guilty 
of Sabbath desecration. Let us, then, take these three 
principles, and the example of Jesus, our great Pat- 
tern, down into the problem of Sabbath observance 
to-day. It is confessedly a big problem, but if we 
shall faithfully seek to follow our great Guide, we 
shall have light enough to walk by, I am sure. 

V. The Standard Christian Life Recognizes the 
Value of the Word of God. 

Read this fourth chapter of Luke, and ponder the 
scene as I have done. The Master was probably 
recognized when He came into the synagogue, and 
the attendant asked him to read the closing lesson, 
handing him the roll of the Prophet Isaiah. Jesus 
knew His Bible. I have wondered what words He 
would have read from the other prophets. At any 
rate, He knew His Isaiah, and turned at once to 
the passage He wanted, and read it. Now, here is the 
interesting thing. Listen ! "And he closed the book, 
and gave it to the minister, and sat down. And the 
eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were 
fastened on him." The point is, He attracted general 
attention just from the way He read the Scripture, 
and before He had made any comment at all. Some 
preachers rush from the Scripture to get to their 
sermon, but not so with Jesus. He must have read 
it with unique emphasis and intonation. 

One commendable thing, then, I find in this old 
synagogue order of worship: The great moment of 
the service was when the law was uncovered and 



GOD'S STAND AED MAN 203 



read. The sermon itself was only a translation into 
the language of the people, with a few comments or 
explanations. We have given the sermon the place 
of supreme emphasis, but they did not make that 
mistake. Man's comment was secondary, and God's 
was primary. They were right, and we are wrong. 
I enter in fancy their synagogue. There it is, on the 
highest piece of land in the town. The end opposite 
the entrance points to Jerusalem, and there at that 
end are the seats of the elders, and in the midst of 
these is the ark in which the roll of the law was pre- 
served. I see the Rabbi take the scroll from the ark 
and reverently unroll it in such a way that the con- 
gregation may not look upon the writing. I note that 
my Lord stood up to read, for the law was that one 
must stand while reading the prophets, and might 
remain seated while reading from the historical 
books. I like to imagine myself one of the congre- 
gation. Don't you wish you could have been there? 
I know my eyes, like theirs, would have been riveted 
on Him and I know I should have hung on His 
words. I see Him as He takes His seat. I see the 
people nudge one another and say : " Is not this the 
carpenter's son ? " Then I hear again His brave, 
stinging words. I see the gathering storm as their 
brows wrinkle, and the leaders rise from their seats, 
and a mob forms, and they hustle God's Gentleman 
out to the brow of the hill to murder Him — for His 
sermon. And then I come to myself, and I say: 
" Maybe if I preached God's Word as He preached 
it, they would want to murder me too," and then I 
remember my theme, and I exclaim, " If He is God's 



204 GOD'S STAND AED MAN 



standard man, what chance have I ? 99 And I cry out 
with the question of Josiah Conder: 

" How shall I follow Him I serve ? 
How shall I copy Him I love ? " 

The only answer I know is to put His life up 
against my poor imperfect one, and like the child of 
the copy-book, try to make my poor scrawl of a life 
more and more like the perfect pattern at the top of 
the page. God help us all to keep struggling on, " till 
we all come to a perfect man, to the measure of the 
stature of the fullness of Christ " ! 



XIII 



NEAR-SIGHTED NAZARETH 



"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of 
James ... ? And are not his sisters here . . . t 
And they were offended at him" — Mark 6:3. 



Jesus of Nazareth. Trade: Carpenter. Name of 
mother: Mary. Names of younger brothers: James 
and Joses and Juda and Simon. Sisters : Names un- 
known, but living at same address. About the only 
thing it omits is the telephone number. Yes, some- 
body drew a diagram of Jesus' family tree, and then 
looked at the map, and went off in disgust. This 
text, you understand, is the comment of certain citi- 
zens of Nazareth, Palestine, about the preacher who 
filled their pulpit one Sabbath in the year a. d. 27. 
I have heard many comments on sermons after serv- 
ice, but never one like this. Usually if a man becomes 
famous, his home town is very proud of him, and 
gives him a royal welcome when he returns. But in 
this case the townsfolk of Jesus said in effect : " No- 
body can be great who has ever lived next to us. 
Nobody can be famous whose family we know." 
They failed to see the reflection on themselves which 
these words implied. 
Let us see where we are in the life of Jesus. The 

205 




ELL, that was a pretty good biography of 
Jesus for twenty words, wasn't it? It 
reads about like a city directory. Name : 



206 NEAK-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 



fact is that our Lord has just completed a wonderful 
cycle of miracles, and Mark sketches these wondrous 
works in swift succession in order to reach a climax 
in the scene of the text. First, the Master stills the 
storm on the Sea of Galilee. Nature found her Mas- 
ter for the first time since God told the stars to shine, 
and the winds to blow, and the waters to surge. Here 
is One who can take the sea in His lap like a fretful 
child, and hush it to sleep. The second scene in 
Mark's drama is over in the country of the Gadarenes, 
where the Lord finds a candidate for the ministry in 
the cemetery, and transforms the Gadarene demoniac 
into a Gadarene evangelist who preached with such 
power that all men marvelled at him. Being invited 
out of their country by those city officials, who pre- 
ferred swine to souls, the Master took ship and went 
to Capernaum. Hardly has His boat landed when the 
third scene is introduced by an official from the syna- 
gogue of the city, who flings himself passionately at 
Jesus' feet, and asks Him to hasten to his home to 
save his little dying girl twelve years of age. The 
good Physician starts on His way, and in the crowd 
is touched by the woman with the issue of blood, 
whom He also heals. Arrived at the house He puts 
the undertakers, and the paid mourners, and the rela- 
tives and friends out of the room, because they 
laughed at what He said and what He knew to be 
true. Out they went, and back came the spirit of the 
little girl. Now notice : Jesus has demonstrated His 
power in four different realms. He is supreme over 
ocean wave, and demon spirit, and wasted body, and 
pulseless heart. If this keeps on, He will ride on a 



\ 



STEAK-SIGHTED NAZAKETH 207 



flood-tide of popularity into the hearts of the people. 
What will He do now? In the height of His glory 
He comes back to Nazareth once more. He had 
visited there before, and they had almost broken His 
heart; but believing as He does in the Gospel of the 
Second Chance, He goes home again. It was an 
easy day's journey from Capernaum on the lakeside 
to Nazareth among the hills, and the Master hopes 
that some tidings of His success have reached His 
fellow-townsmen by this time. So home the con- 
quering Hero comes. 

We have now reached the text. My text is really 
the matchless little cameo, this cartoon, if you will, 
the first six verses of the sixth chapter of Mark. I 
am so thankful for this human picture of Jesus, who 
is anxious, like every other man in the height of his 
power, to get back home. " It is all right to have 
them love me at Capernaum, but what do they say 
about me at Nazareth ? " There is no word for home 
in the Hebrew language, because the sons of Pales- 
tine have always regarded themselves as pilgrim 
strangers in the earth, but their word for house 
means a refuge; Jesus was thus seeking a refuge 
back with His old friends and neighbours: for 
whether it be Nazareth or New York, there is no 
place like home. 

When Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, died 
in Paris some years ago, he was laid to rest in 
the soil of his native land, which he had brought 
with him (when compelled to abdicate his throne) 
for that very purpose. He would sleep in South 
American soil even in France. When Mr. Lin- 



208 NEAK-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 



coin received the news of his nomination by the 
Chicago Convention in i860, he crushed the dispatch 
into his pocket, and amid the shouts of those around, 
quietly rose and said, " There is a little woman down 
at our house who would like to hear about this. I 
think I will go down and tell her." When Mr. Gar- 
field took the oath of office as President of the United 
States before the assembled thousands, the first thing 
he did as President was to bend and kiss the aged 
mother who had followed him with her love and 
prayers from the canal-boat to the White House, 
Then, too, when the Roman General came home after 
winning his country's battles abroad, he was honoured 
by a triumphal arch 'neath which he marched in 
majesty, and was accompanied to his home by the 
anthems of an appreciative people. Everywhere the 
man who has heard the plaudits of the world finds 
sweetest of all the praises of home. How was it with 
Jesus? Legend would have made it the same with 
Him, but the honest Scripture narrative gives us 
instead of climax, anticlimax. The Hero of Caper- 
naum and Gadara becomes the Outcast of Nazareth. 
They called Him the Carpenter and went on about 
their business ; and He quietly went out of their city 
gate with a broken heart. 

A Scotch preacher has dared to try to paint this 
picture. He portrays a simple house, with a group 
of men and women and children about the door. On 
the faces of two of the men is a laugh as one of them 
moves off to his work. A woman is picking up a pail 
of water, and another turning into the house. Both 
are indifferently taking up their tasks again after be- 



NEAK-SIGHTED NAZAKETH 209 



ing interrupted by a Stranger. Only the children are 
wistfully watching the Man as He goes down the 
road. As for the Master, His garments are travel- 
stained, His feet bleeding from the long jour- 
ney to reach His home, and His gait is marked by 
weariness. There is no anger in His eyes, but His 
head is bent upon His breast, His hands hang heavy 
at His side, and the evening mists are gathering be- 
fore Him as He trudges on into the night. 

This text of ours catches the Saviour before He 
leaves town. I propose to go through that Sabbath 
day with Him, and note the evolution of the unbelief 
of these Nazarenes. The trouble with the people 
was, they were near-sighted. They needed spectacles. 
They were suffering from moral astigmatism. Their 
lenses were in bad need of repair. Their horizon was 
too small. And we can discover, I think, three steps 
in their attitude, or three degrees in their near-sight- 
edness. The first result of their near-sightedness was 
Admiration, the second was Indignation, and the third 
was Lost Salvation. Let us study these in detail. 

/. The First Result of Their Near-sightedness 
Was Admiration. 

Some one has compared the Christ of the Four 
Gospels to the several hours of the day. The Jesus 
of Matthew he compares to the morning sun in a 
cloudless sky; the Jesus of Luke to the rainbow set 
by the retiring sun along the track of the retreating 
storm. The Jesus of John is compared to the open 
heaven of a perfect day. But the Jesus of Mark re- 
minds us of the afternoon tempest shouting through 



210 NEAE-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 



the air and uprooting the great oak trees. This 
description is true of the scene before us, at least. 
The Man of Galilee comes into that quiet town of 
Nazareth, and really upsets things. He blows across 
the tranquil life of those villagers as a mighty wind 
which tears up everything that does not bend in ac- 
cordance with its direction. The people begin to sit 
up and take notice when this unexpected Visitor be- 
gins to speak. 

Let us picture to ourselves the scene if we can. 
Jesus probably entered the town quietly one day, 
and without furor or flurry awaited the coming of 
the Sabbath day, and then went to the synagogue for 
worship. The synagogue service of the time was not 
stereotyped but free, and hence the presiding officer 
would feel at liberty to ask Jesus to take part in the 
service at the proper time. When the opportunity 
was given, the Master began to speak. I can just 
fancy the look on the faces of the congregation as 
He proceeded in His address. " He spoke as one 
having authority and not as the scribes." You re- 
member how Simias said to Socrates, " Cebes and I 
have been considering your argument, and we think 
it is barely sufficient ; " and how Socrates replied, " I 
dare say you are right, my friend." But there is 
none of this apologetic concession about this Naza- 
reth Preacher. He sweeps the decks before Him with 
His majestic pronouncements, and these people who 
had known Him for years and traded at His shop can 
only gasp in their wonderment and admiration. They 
were astonished both at His teaching and miracles, as 
all the world has since been. 



NEAK-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 211 



Jesus of Nazareth has had many admirers. When 
Schrenk the theologian read the words " Blessed are 
the pure in heart," he exclaimed, " That language has 
been spoken only once." Jean Paul Richter said of 
Him, " He is the purest among the mighty, and the 
mightiest among the pure." Channing, that broad 
Unitarian whose spirit was so much broader than his 
creed, said, " His character is entirely removed from 
human comprehension." Sabatier, the French church- 
man, when weary of life, and not knowing where to 
turn, said he went to Jesus of Nazareth, because in 
Him alone he could find optimism without frivolity, 
and seriousness without despair. Even John Stuart 
Mill found in the life and sayings of Jesus a " stamp 
of originality which put the Prophet of Nazareth in 
the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of 
whom our species can boast," and he goes on to add 
that religion has not made a bad choice in pitching on 
this Man as the ideal representative and guide of 
humanity. Oh, yes, the world has laid garlands 
a-plenty at His feet. John Hay, nineteen centuries 
after His time, built our American diplomacy upon 
His teachings. Bernard Shaw, the iconoclast, asks 
the question, "Why not give Christianity a trial?" 
Dr. Gladden claims that the Carpenter was the in- 
spiration of Dante the poet, Angelo the artist, Fichte 
the philosopher, Hugo the litterateur, Wagner the mu- 
sician, and Ruskin the preacher. You remember that 
only twenty-nine of the first two thousand names sug- 
gested for our American Hall of Fame were ac- 
cepted, but Jesus of Nazareth has had a practically 
unanimous vote of the world's appreciation. 



212 NEAE-SXGHTED NAZAKETH 



Now I come to the point: Mere admiration is 
not enough in the case of Jesus Christ. Look, for 
example, at the attitude of Nicodemus. What an 
astounding conversation that is, on the housetop that 
night, between the doctor of theology and the Car- 
penter of Nazareth ! Dr. Nicodemus comes with his 
admiring and appreciative verdict : " Rabbi, we know 
that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man 
can do the works thou doest except God be with him." 
Now, you would expect the flattered young Mechanic 
to reply, " Thank you so much, Doctor. I appreciate 
your tribute to my origin." Instead of that, what 
does Jesus say ? " You, sir, must be born from 
above." What an amazing reply ! And as far as we 
know, Nicodemus never came out into the open, but 
instead of salvation, contented himself with admira- 
tion. You see the same thing in the case of Peter on 
the Day of Pentecost. The people marvelled at the 
things they saw. But Peter does not allow their 
emotion to stop at the mile-post called wonder, but 
hammered home the truth until 3,000 souls had made 
their way through into the Grand Central Station of 
Peace with God through Jesus Christ. Why stop at 
a way-station when the express will carry you home ? 
That was the trouble with near-sighted Nazareth, for 
she mistook the way-station for the terminal and got 
off in the wilderness, and never found her way home 
to God. 

On the other hand, there are many who board the 
train at the way-station, who ultimately land at home. 
I remember the young Japanese about whom Dr. 
Woelfkin told us on one occasion. He said that this 



NEAE-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 213 



young man came to him and told him that he wanted 
to be a Christian, but that he was not sure about the 
deity of Christ, and Dr. Woelf kin asked : " What 
do you believe about Jesus ? " " Oh/' said he, " I 
admire Him immensely. I regard Him as the most 
lovable character of whom I have ever read. I would 
like to model my life on His. But I am afraid I can- 
not be a Christian on that." Dr. Woelf kin replied: 
" Take Him on the faith that you have, and if you 
are willing to be led into higher heights and deeper 
depths He will reveal Himself more fully to you as 
the days go by. ,, And Dr. Woelfkin said that the 
young Japanese came back to him some months later 
with a smile on his face, saying, " Now I know that 
He is the Son of God." What had happened ? His 
admiration for Christ as a Man had grown into 
reverence for Christ as a God. Doubtless the young 
Japanese could have repeated sincerely the words of 
Richard Watson Gilder's imaginary heathen who was 
sojourning in Galilee in the year 32 a. d. : 

" If Jesus Christ is a Man, 
And only a Man, I say 
That of all mankind I will cleave to Him, 
And to Him will I cleave alway. 

* If Jesus Christ is a God, 
And the only God, I swear 
I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
The earth, the sea and the air," 

//. The Second Result of Their Near-sightedness 
Was Indignation. 

Notice, if you will, the strange reactions of the 
human heart. The same congregation which at first 



214 NEAE-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 



was delighted now seems disgusted. The wiseacres 
and officials said in substance this : " Why, this is per- 
fectly ridiculous. What the young man says is won- 
derful enough ; but the idea of Him teaching us ! We 
who live out on Knob Hill have often brought Him 
our plows to mend, and here we sit listening to the 
instruction of a tradesman who has never seen a 
theological seminary, and has never been licensed to 
preach. The idea of a carpenter turned prophet, and 
of a mechanic become minister ! " Now all this dis- 
cussion was going on while Jesus proceeded with His 
sermon, and it was rather discourteous to the Speaker, 
to say the least. 

I, for one, am much obliged to these critics. 
Without knowing it they have given us some interest- 
ing information. Here alone we are told that Jesus 
worked at the carpenter's trade. Elsewhere we learn 
that this was His father's occupation, but here alone 
that it was His too. It looks as though Joseph was 
dead at this time and Jesus had become the head of 
the house and the bread-winner. 

One of the old church fathers seems to think it 
necessary to save Christ's dignity from the prose fact 
of handling the hammer and saw, and toiling at the 
carpenter's bench; and so he says that Jesus, by 
making plows and yokes, taught by these symbols the 
necessity of righteousness and action. But the prose 
fact remains. Let us not make poetry of it. Let us 
tell the upset world to-day that Jesus was a car- 
penter. Go tell it to the man on the East side, the 
man of the Labour Union, the Bolshevik. Tell him 
that Jesus was a Carpenter before He was a Re- 



NEAR-SIGHTED NAZARETH 215 



deemer, and this will bring back the Christ of the high 
altar and the stained window to where He belongs 
by the side of the labouring man. 

Will you stop with me in front of this Carpenter's 
shop for a moment ? Every educated Jewish boy was 
supposed to be taught a trade. The Rabbis said that 
he who taught not his boy some useful occupation 
was training him for idleness and thievery. The vil- 
lage carpenter in Christ's time w T as very much like 
the modern village blacksmith. Almost all the agri- 
cultural implements were made of wood, and conse- 
quently the village workshop would become the center 
of the town's life. Our Lord never forgot His train- 
ing there, for all through His ministry there were 
reminiscences of these days cropping out. When He 
spoke of the splinter and the beam, and the green 
wood versus the dry, and the cubit added to the 
stature, He was running back in memory to the day 
of the commonplace toil. 

Now, let us turn from the Carpenter to His critics. 
Ho for these people who explain a man by the city 
directory! Can Stratford-on-Avon explain Shake- 
speare? When you have threaded all its highways 
and byways, and surveyed its shops and studied 
its life, can you put them all together and make 
Hamlet? Can Eisleben explain Luther? When you 
have run through all the history of the place, and 
visited the Burgomeister, and met all the dignitaries 
of the time, do you get the materials of the Lutheran 
Reformation there? And similarly, can Corsica ex- 
plain Napoleon? Does the little island, with all its 
wide expanse of ocean view, give you a prophecy of 



216 NEAE-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 



the French Revolution ? No, none of these do. And 
can Nazareth explain Jesus ? Can you find anywhere 
in its lanes and fountains, its people or possessions, 
any explanation of this Carpenter? No, the city 
directory is not meant to furnish foundations for 
character. It simply tells you the place a genius 
hangs up his hat or takes off his shoes; but it does 
not explore the man's soul. If big cities made big 
men, we should all want to be born in New York or 
London. But as a matter of fact, there are many 
men born in New York who are never heard of in 
Hoboken ; while another man can be born in Hodgen- 
ville, Kentucky, who will shake a great nation at a 
time of civil war; and another Man can be born in 
Bethlehem of Palestine and move the world. 

" Common as the wayside grasses, 
Ordinary as the soil, 
By the score he daily passes, 
Going to and from his toil, 
Stranger he to wealth and fame — 
He is only What's-His-Name. 

" Cheerful 'neath the load he's bearing, 

(For he always bears a load;) 
Patiently forever faring 

On his ordinary road; 
All his days are much the same — 

Uncomplaining What's-His-Name. 

"Not for him is glittering glory, 

Not for him the places high ; 
Week by week the same old story — 

Try and fail and fail and try. 
Life for him is dull and tame — 

Poor old plodding What's-His-Name. 



NE AE- SIGHTED NAZAEETH 217 



" Tho* to some one else the guerdon, 
Tho' but few his worth may know; 

On his shoulders rests the burden 
Of our progress won so slow. 

Red the road by which we came 
With the blood of What's-His-Name." 

Do you realize the greatness of the people next 
door to you? Most of us are far-sighted when it 
comes to this. Distance lends enchantment to the 
view. I wonder if that is not what the writer of 
Proverbs has in mind when he says, " Wisdom is be- 
fore the eyes of him that hath understanding, but 
the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth. ,, 
Here is the Persian farmer, Ali Hafed, who sold his 
possessions and went far in search of precious gems, 
when, had he only known it, the great Golconda 
diamond mines lay hidden in his own front yard. 
William Winter has described for us the people who 
lived in Shakespeare's time, and passed him on the 
street without knowing whom he was : 

" The folk who lived in Shakespeare's day, 
And saw that gentle spirit pass 
By London Bridge the frequent way, — 
They little knew what man he was." 

When the statue of a literary man was unveiled 
abroad some years ago, an American visitor said to 
the widow of the man his nation delighted to honour : 
"What an inexpressible privilege you had to know 
him so intimately, to listen to his table talk." " I 
suppose so," she replied, " but his table manners were 
not always nice." Genius could not be recognized 



218 NEAK-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 



for forks and spoons and knives. " Far-away birds 
have fine feathers," indeed, as the old saw has it. 
Maeterlinck in the preface to his translation of 
Emerson said truly : " There remains only the life of 
to-day, and yet we cannot live without greatness/' 
He goes on to point out that one secret of Emerson's 
greatness was his discovery of the sublimity of the 
commonplace daily toil of life. You have read how 
a strange workman one day took his place among the 
shipwrights in a yard in Amsterdam. He occupied 
himself with the rudest work at first, for it was evi- 
dent to all that he was not a master workman. What 
was the astonishment of his fellow-workers to see 
persons of the highest rank come and pay their re- 
spects to him ; for he was no less a person than Peter 
the Great, the founder of the Russian Empire. Here 
was a czar in the clothes of a shipwright, and yonder 
in Nazareth was a God in the guise of a carpenter ; 
and if we look sharp we too may discover unexpected 
greatness next door to us, in the guise of some two- 
by-four commonplace soul. 

" Joses the brother of Jesus was only a worker in wood, 
And he never could see the glory that Jesus his 

Brother could; 
'Why stays He not in the workshop/ he often used 

to complain, 

'Sawing the Lebanon cedar, imparting to woods 
their stain ? ' 

"Thus ran the mind of Joses, apt with plummet 
and rule, 

And deeming whoever surpassed him either a 
knave or a fool. 



NEAK-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 219 



For he never walked with the prophets in God's 
great garden of bliss, 
And of all the mistakes of the ages the saddest 
methinks was this, — 
To have such a Brother as Jesus, to speak with 
Him day by day, — 
But never to catch the vision which glorified His 
clay." 

How did Jesus receive the glad hand of ice which 
Nazareth gave Him ? Oh, He quietly remarked that 
a prophet has no honour in his own country, and then 
calmly went on His way. Now take Mohammed's 
list of the four great prophets: Abraham, Moses, 
Christ, and himself. You discover that Abraham had 
to leave Ur and go to Canaan; Moses had to leave 
Egypt and go to Midian ; Christ had to leave Nazareth 
and go to Calvary; and Mohammed had to leave 
Mecca and go to Medina. A prophet's home-folks 
don't like him. Dante was expelled from Florence. 
Necker had to flee from the fickle people whom he 
had saved in the financial crisis of the French Revo- 
lution. Suvarof was scorned by his own king. 
And Wolsey was turned over in his gray hairs by the 
government to which he had given the best years of 
his life. Truly, the world rewards its prophets with 
a cross ! A certain text-book on Physics in discuss- 
ing the subject of thermometry mentions principally 
three: The Centigrade, the Fahrenheit, and the 
Reaumur. The author shows that by the very irony 
of history, in not a single case of the three has a 
nation officially adopted the thermometer invented by 
one of her own sons; and in a footnote he says: 
" Truly, a prophet is not without honour but in his 



220 NEAB-SIGHTED NAZARETH 



own country." We can understand this treatment of 
the prophet when we get a proper definition of him 
and his work. A prophet has been defined as a man 
who goes ahead alone and opens some new door in 
human history. Holding the door open with one 
hand, with the other he wields a sword until hu- 
manity has marched in procession through the door. 
Then when enough have gone in the prophet finds 
that his work is done, and he passes on to his reward. 
He indeed is a man w r ho is " cannonaded this side of 
heaven and canonized on the other side," and who- 
soever does the work of a prophet shall likewise re- 
ceive a prophet's reward: the cross here, and the 
crown yonder. 

777. The Third Result of Nazareth's Near-sight- 
edness Was Lost Salvation. 

Doubt Street runs in two directions, and he who 
is a traveller in the street of Doubt may be headed to- 
ward the end which runs out into the Boulevard of 
Unbelief, or on the contrary he may be going toward 
the Highway of Faith. St. Thomas was a traveller 
for a while on this street, but he found the way 
getting darker and darker as he proceeded, and he 
suddenly turned him about while he still had daylight 
to see, and he made his way back to the broad acreage 
of Sunshine Land which we call Faith. Now these 
Nazarenes, on the other hand, when they once got 
started on the highway, held on their road ^until they 
landed in the Tunnel of Darkness which we call Un- 
belief. It makes all the difference which way you are 
headed on the Road of Doubt. 



NEAK-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 221 



There is such a thing, be it known, as the art o£ 
doubting well. That is Plato's definition of philos- 
ophy, I believe, " the art of doubting well." The 
poet Browning in fancy builds two worlds side by 
side. One of them he calls Rephan, w^hich he de- 
scribes as a world free from the pull and strain of 
doubt, but as a consequence utterly stagnant; while 
on the other hand, the globe which he calls Earth is a 
place filled with misgivings and doubts but at the same 
time full of progress and hope. This is a true con- 
trast, doubtless, for doubt is a sign of life if we will 
only take the poet's advice and cleave to its sunnier 
side. But the people of our story insisted on taking 
the shady side of the street, and in walking deeper 
and deeper into the gloom until they found themselves 
in the Night of Unbelief, too far removed from the 
Saviour's gracious healing power to be blessed and 
helped by Him. 

Listen to the record : " He could there do no mighty 
work because of their unbelief." That is putting the 
matter very strongly, is it not? Is it possible that 
unbelief can tie the hands of Omnipotence? Yes, 
that is it. Here is the word of a modern psychologist : 
" Faith is the channel through which the power mani- 
fests, the power itself being God. Prayer is the at- 
mosphere in which the power works, and suggestion 
is the method by which the soul is brought into rela- 
tion with that power." So modern psychology con- 
firms the ancient record: for if faith is the channel 
through which the divine power is manifested, then 
by the same token unbelief is the gate which closes 
the entrance to the channel, and even Omnipotence 



222 NEAK-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 



cannot force its way through a wall erected by the 
human will without doing violence to that will. 
Hence it is that healing is impossible without faith. 
There is one view of the miracles of Christ which in- 
sists that their main object was to produce faith in 
Him and His mission. If that is so, then the place 
for the greatest exhibition of miracles would be the 
place where unbelief was the most dense; but the 
very opposite is the fact: where faith is already 
present, there the miracles appear; and where it is 
absent they fail to be manifest : — all of which shows 
that faith is a prerequisite rather than a consequence 
of help from God. 

How is it with us to-day ? Are we pilgrims of the 
twentieth century still marching along the highways 
of Doubt, as were the ancient Nazarenes? Mr. G. K. 
Chesterton, the eminent English essayist, puts it 
quaintly when he remarks that modesty has re- 
moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon 
the organ of conviction. He says it is quite proper 
that men should be somewhat uncertain about their 
own abilities, but it is too bad that they should be so 
uncertain about their convictions. He believes that 
we are on the road to producing a race of men so 
mentally modest that they will refuse to believe in the 
multiplication table. I will agree with Mr. Chester- 
ton in so far as this : that those who are marching on 
the highway of Doubt toward the darkness are fitly 
described by him, but I insist that he is blind to the 
countless number of pilgrims who are going the other 
way, and who can sing with feeling the old familiar 
hymn: 



NEAK-SIGHTKD NAZAEETH 223 



" Here in the body pent, 

Absent from Him I roam, 
But nightly pitch my roving tent 
A day's march nearer home." 

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: if 
we turn our backs on Jesus of Nazareth we will be 
the losers, and not He. Do you remember that 
last touch of the artist before this scene closes ? Here 
it is : "And he went round about the villages teach- 
ing." Jesus of Nazareth insists on being heard some- 
where, and if the city of Nazareth will not receive 
Him, a village in the quiet country will take Him in. 
I like that thing Disraeli once said to a discouraged 
Jew : " Remember, you belong to a race that can do 
everything else but fail." The Carpenter, Christ, is 
a Man who can do everything else but fail. He can 
be born in a manger, raised in an out-of-the-way vil- 
lage, apprenticed to a humble trade; He can be be- 
trayed by his friends and condemned like a criminal 
and die like a convict; but the one thing He cannot 
do ultimately is to fail. He must rise again on 
the third day. Let New York and Los Angeles and 
all the big Nazareths of the twentieth century be 
well assured that if they ask Jesus out He will go, 
but their loss will be others' gain. He will not be 
stung into silence by their indifference, but will 
quietly go on His way to victory by way of the vil- 
lage places. To-day I can see in fancy the same 
Carpenter standing before your city gates and mine. 
The latch is on the inside. He will never force His 
way in. What shall we do with Him? Shall we 
fling open the gate and lead Him down Victory, Way, 



224 NEAK-SIGHTED NAZAEETH 



and give Him the keys of the city to keep for aye? 
Or shall we just quietly go on with the Wall Streets 
and the Broadways and the Fifth Avenues of life, 
while He sadly turns away to where a warmer wel- 
come waits ? No, by the help of God it shall not be. 
There is a Carpenter at the gate, and we will let 
Him in. 

"Behold Him now where He comes, 

Not the Christ of our subtle creeds, 
But the Light of our hearts and homes, 

Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs ; 
The Brother of want and blame, 

The Lover of women and men — 
With a love that puts to shame 

All passions of mortal ken. 
Ah, No ! Thou Light of the heart, 

Never shalt Thou depart — 
Not till the leaven of God 

Shall lighten each human clod; 
Not till the world shall climb 

To Thy height serene, sublime, 
Shall the Christ who enters our door 

Pass to return no more." 



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